The British Atlantic

Research Interests

Brooke Newman is a historian of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic, with a focus on empire, the British monarchy, and the histories and legacies of slavery. She’s the author of "The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas" (Mariner, 2026) and "A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica" (Yale University Press, 2018), as well as the co-editor of "Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas" (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Newman is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and her research has been supported, most recently, by MacDowell, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, and the Omohundro Institute and Georgian Papers Programme. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Jamaica Observer, among others. 

Select Publications

• “British Atlantic Ideas about Race, Slavery, and Empire,” in The Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonization, Vol. 2, ed. Stephanie Smallwood and Kris Manjapra (Cambridge University Press, 2027).
• “The British Monarchy’s Links to Colonialism, Slavery, and Abolition,” in European Monarchies and Colonialism, ed. Gert J. Oostindie and Karwan Fatah-Black (Leiden University Press, 2026).
• “‘Unjust and inhuman’: How the Royal Family Ignored a Black Abolitionist’s Plea to End the Slave Trade,” Guardian, Jan. 29, 2026.
• “The British Crown Enslaved Thousands at the Height of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” Smithsonian Magazine, Jan. 26, 2026).
• “Sexual Intermixture, Blood Lineage, and Legal Disabilities in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the British Atlantic,” in The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism, ed. Dagmar Herzog and Chelsea Schields (May 2021).
• “‘The Case of Polly Indian’: Enslavement, Native Ancestry, and the Law in the British Caribbean,” in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Global History, ed. Ann McGrath and Lynette Russell (September 2021).
• “Blood Fictions, Maternal Inheritance, and the Legacies of Colonial Slavery,” Women Studies Quarterly 48, no. 1 & 2 (spring/summer 2020): 27-44.