In this study of transnational relations across the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British empire, identified in the book’s title as ‘the intimacies of four continents’, Lisa Lowe explores the complicated histories of slavery and racial discrimination in relation to modern liberal values of human freedom, rational progress, and social equality. She joins a long list of scholars who have examined the interconnections between these broad, important themes from various theoretical, literary, philosophical, and historical perspectives. Lowe situates her analyses within a framework of interdisciplinary literary studies, drawing upon essays, autobiographies, novels, and philosophical works. She embeds close primary readings of texts within an intellectual framework that provides evidence of wide reading in empirical history – oddly labelled ‘the colonial archive’ – and in political economy, Marxist political theory, and philosophy. The main thrust of the book and the arguments of various chapters are summed up several times on pages 136–9. Readers are recommended to look at those pages first before reading the whole book.

Lowe’s aims in The intimacies of four continents are twofold. First, she offers a reading of the transition from slavery to freedom in the British imperial context that eschews a clear linear progress from one category to another. Thus, as she argues, this was a transition in which slavery was never fully left behind, in the sense that indentured or contract labour was soon found as a substitute, in the form of Chinese and Indian servants. Equally, as she also explains, freedom was rarely full freedom because major inequalities in social, economic, and political rights persisted long after laws dealing with abolition or emancipation were enacted. Second, Lowe follows in the wake of numerous scholars who have sought to relate the seemingly hidden relations between domestic life and labour in Britain and the objects and commodities associated with slaves, servants, and their work in the colonies. A specific example is her focus on the transnational context in which the presence of black servants in English houses, domestic consumption of tea and sugar, and home demand for brightly coloured textiles based on Indian designs were ways in which enforced colonial labour underpinned bourgeois comforts and respectability at home.

After an introductory chapter that presents the main lines of argument, four substantive chapters offer detailed explications of primary texts related to the book’s broad themes. In chapter 2, the former slave Equiano’s Interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself (1789) is analysed to highlight the tensions and contradictions of liberal emancipation. Lowe concludes that Equiano’s frequent references in his autobiography to the pain and suffering of slavery show that ‘the liberal remedy of emancipation has not resolved the injustices of slavery and its subsequent inequalities’ (p. 61). The comforts of bourgeois domesticity and a black servant depicted in Thackeray’s novel Vanity fair (1847–8) are related in chapter 3 to the work of Africans and Asians who produced the material fabrics and furnishings of the middle-class bedroom. Chapter 4 considers liberal government in the publications of John Stuart Mill and in the writings of British colonial administrators during and after the First Opium War (1839–42). The focus is on the impact of liberal ideas on ‘rationales for the innovation of new forms of imperial sovereignty for managing ports, seas, and population’ (p. 108). Chapter 5 examines historical philosophies in Hegel’s Lectures on the philosophy of world history (1837), C. L. R. James’s The black Jacobins (1938), and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black reconstruction (1935) in order to discuss ‘the coloniality of received histories, and to specify their engagements with and departures from earlier dialectical forms’ (p. 140).

Providing a convincing historical context is sometimes the Achilles’ heel of The intimacies of four continents. Lowe argues erroneously that the Chinese replaced convict labour in colonial Australia. This was not the case. Convict transportation to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land ended in 1840 and 1853. Most Chinese emigrants to colonial Australia came to exploit the gold rush of the early 1850s, and arrived voluntarily, principally in Victoria: they were not a substitute for convict labourers. Lowe states that the British Atlantic slave system was in decline by the late eighteenth century, which is not the commonly accepted view: most historians argue that this did not occur until after 1815. She further argues that the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and slave emancipation in 1834 resulted from the potential of black revolution and attempts to resolve difficulties in the Caribbean sugar economy. However, most historians would argue that staving off black rebellion was not a prominent reason for the abolition of the British slave trade, and that slave emancipation was only partially related to problems arising in the international sugar economy.

The intimacies of four continents will join the list of sophisticated attempts to consider the limitations of liberal thought in relation to the tangled history of racial discrimination, slavery, contract labour, and the expanding British imperial possessions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Progress and development associated with the liberal norms of the modern world are subject to critical analysis in this account. Potential readers will need to be familiar with the work of Foucault, Hegel, Quijano, and others, and the use of concepts such as ‘biopolitical’, ‘sublation’, and ‘coloniality’, in order to understand the discursive material presented in the book. This is not to suggest, however, that The intimacies of four continents is difficult to read; on the contrary, it is lucid, cogent, and succinct in the development of its ideas.