Smith, Emma. "Slavery, sugar, and the value of Shakespeare." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/slavery-sugar-and-the-value-of-shakespeare. [Date accessed].

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Slavery, sugar, and the value of Shakespeare

Contending with the human cost of valuable books

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Emma Smith
University of Oxford

How and why books became valuable in 18th-century Britain was not simply a story of taste and scholarship, but one fueled by the vast profits of slavery and plantation economies. As sugar wealth flooded the market, it transformed secondhand texts like Shakespeare’s First Folio into coveted symbols of status, embedding slave-produced capital into the foundations of literary material culture. To understand our libraries and editorial traditions today, we must confront how deeply these systems of value were shaped by the economics and injustices of the transatlantic slave trade.

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