The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

by Maya Jasanoff
The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

by Maya Jasanoff

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Overview

“Enlightening, compassionate, superb” —John Le Carré

Winner of the  2018 Cundill History Prize

New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017
One of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2017

A visionary exploration of the life and times of Joseph Conrad, his turbulent age of globalization and our own, from one of the most exciting young historians writing today


Migration,"terrorism" the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, and a communications revolution: these forces shaped Joseph Conrad’s destiny at the dawn of the twentieth century. In this brilliant new interpretation of one of the great voices in modern literature, Maya Jasanoff reveals Conrad as a prophet of globalization. As an immigrant from Poland to England, and in travels from Malaya to Congo to the Caribbean, Conrad navigated an interconnected world, and captured it in a literary oeuvre of extraordinary depth. His life story delivers a history of globalization from the inside out, and reflects powerfully on the aspirations and challenges of the modern world.
 
Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, to Polish parents in the Russian Empire. At sixteen he left the landlocked heart of Europe to become a sailor, and for the next twenty years travelled the world’s oceans before settling permanently in England as an author. He saw the surging, competitive "new imperialism" that planted a flag in almost every populated part of the globe. He got a close look, too, at the places “beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines,” and the hypocrisy of the west’s most cherished ideals.
 
In a compelling blend of history, biography, and travelogue, Maya Jasanoff follows Conrad’s routes and the stories of his four greatest works—The Secret AgentLord JimHeart of Darkness, and Nostromo. Genre-bending, intellectually thrilling, and deeply humane, The Dawn Watch embarks on a spell-binding expedition into the dark heart of Conrad’s world—and through it to our own.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780143111047
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 11/06/2018
Pages: 400
Sales rank: 675,639
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Maya Jasanoff is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard. She is the author of the prize-winning Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2005) and Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction and the George Washington Book Prize. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Jasanoff won the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. Her essays and reviews appear frequently in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New York Review of Books.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xv

List of Maps xix

Prologue: One of Us 1

Part 1 Nation

1 No Home, No Country 17

2 The Point of Departure 44

3 Among Strangers 58

Part 2 Ocean

4 Following the Sea 89

5 Going into Steam 115

6 When Your Ship Fails You 133

Part 3 Civilization

7 Heart to Heart 155

8 The Dark Places 186

9 White Savages 215

Part 4 Empire

10 A New World 241

11 Material Interests 263

12 Whether the World Likes It or Not 284

Epilogue: To Make You See 311

Acknowledgments 316

Notes 321

Further Reading 359

Index 365

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