The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850-1914

It began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of the Edwin Fox reveals how an everyday merchant ship drew together a changing world and its people in an extraordinary age of rising empires, sweeping economic transformation, and social change. This fascinating work of global history offers a vividly detailed and engaging narrative of globalization writ small, viewed from the decks and holds of a single vessel. The Edwin Fox connected the lives and histories of millions, though most never even saw it. Built in Calcutta in 1853, the Edwin Fox was chartered by the British navy as a troop transport during the Crimean War. In the following decades, it was sold, recommissioned, and refitted by an increasingly far-flung constellation of militaries and merchants. It sailed to exotic ports carrying luxury goods, mundane wares, and all kinds of people: not just soldiers and officials but indentured laborers brought from China to Cuba, convicts and settlers being transported from the British Empire to western Australia and New Zealand—with dire consequences for local Indigenous peoples—and others. But the power of this story rests in the everyday ways people, nations, economies, and ideas were knitted together in this foundational era of our modern world. Readers will never see globalization the same way again.

About the Author :
Boyd Cothran is associate professor of history at York University. Adrian Shubert is professor emeritus of history at York University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Review :
"Highly recommendable. . . . [I]t is the particular strength of Cothran and Shubert's book to show that it was not only the few well-known and most technologically advanced ships that were instrumental for globalization in the nineteenth century, but also the many unknown and simpler ships like the Edwin Fox. . . . [R]ecommended for anybody interested in world history of the nineteenth century or the beginnings of today's globally connected world."--Pacific Historical Review "A quite useful contribution to filling the 'blue hole' in global history. . . . The Edwin Fox is a good read that can serve as an accessible introduction to the history of nineteenth-century globalization both for undergraduate students and for a broader audience."--American Historical Review