While you were away
School’s back in session, and summer’s sultry days are numbered. Here’s a roundup of new books by Harvard faculty members that you may have missed while soaking up umbrella drinks and saucy paperbacks on some Mexican beach. The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History Princeton University Press, May 2011 By Emma Rothschild Born out of a happy accident, Emma Rothschild’s latest book introduces the Johnstones, a historically obscure Scottish family living disparate lives around the globe in the fast-changing 18th century. While researching in Edinburgh University Library, Rothschild, the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History, stumbled on the letters of James Johnstone to his brother John, a young politician. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Rothschild’s paper trail of letters turned up 11 Johnstone siblings — slave owners, abolitionists, speculators, government officials, and occasional politicians — whose lives on the cusp of revolution, the Enlightenment, and the very early...