Matthew Taylor

During the Anglo-American War of 1812, British forces launched hundreds of amphibious raids on the United States. The richest parts of the United States were slave-states, and thousands of enslaved African Americans fled to British forces in what was to be the largest emancipation of enslaved Americans until the abolition of slavery in the USA. From these refugees from slavery, the British built a force - the Corps of Colonial Marines. Black redcoats, they were a fusion of two great American fears, the return of the British King and an uprising by their own oppressed slaves. The Corps of Colonial Marines turned Britain's campaign on America's coasts from one of harassment to one of existential threat to the new nation. Although small in number, the Colonial Marines - fighting to liberate their own families as much as for Great Britain - exerted a massive psychological impact on the United States which paralysed American resistance with fear of a widespread slave uprising, and allowed British forces in the Chesapeake to burn down Washington DC. As well as examining this little-remembered part of British military and African-American history, this book will also look to the post-war history of the Colonial Marines, their continued survival as a unique ethnic group in the Caribbean today, and their involvement in the largest act of armed African-American resistance to slavery. The "Battle of Negro Fort" in 1816 was the only time American forces left American territory to destroy a fugitive slave community - a community led by former Colonial Marines who, when faced with American attack, raised the British flag. This book brings black history to the fore of the War of 1812, and gives a voice to those enslaved people who - amidst great power competition between a slave-holding Republic and a slave-holding Empire – demonstrated exceptional bravery and initiative to gain precious freedom for themselves and their descendants.

Work allows us to pay the bills. The practical and conceptual divide between work and leisure profoundly shapes our lives. Work is where many of us derive our status and our sense of purpose. Work is so much part of our lives and our culture that we have internalized beliefs about its value and have built our economies and lives around those beliefs. This book reviews how the meaning, status and structure of work have changed across history and cultures. Amidst the Covid-19 crisis, the growth of AI and the climate emergency, it questions the need for the 'growth escalator', in which society relies on continuous growth to flourish, and suggests that we should find ways to step off or at least slow down the 'hedonic treadmill', in which we crave ever more goods only to tire of them ever more quickly. This book posits that we are approaching a new era of work. It outlines some of the factors that might lead to change, including the adoption of forms of universal basic income, the growth of the zero- or low-cost economy (renewable energy, user-generated content, community mutual support), and the growth of self-employment and quasi-autonomous ways of working (including from home) in organizations. It concludes that such changes might foster a more fundamental shift: a growing intolerance to the idea of work as a burden and a desire to transform it from something imposed on us into simply the means by which we live our best lives together, recreating in modern conditions with modern resources, a prehistoric unity between being and working. With 190 illustrations in colour