Progressive Geographies

Daniel Maudlin, A Night at the Inn: Space, Place, and the Elite Experience of Empire, 1650–1850 – Oxford University Press, June 2026

A bold reinterpretation of Georgian Britian and North America that puts inns at the heart of the imperial project.

Inns were ubiquitous across the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period, inn going was universal among the elite citizens of that world and they feature prominently in contemporary accounts and literature as places of rest, refreshment, and good cheer.

A Night at the Inn follows the experiences of an elite traveller on a journey through the North Atlantic world. What becomes clear along the way is that inns were much more than somewhere for a drink, a meal and a bed for the night; they played a central role in what was first a British, later Anglophone, process of national and imperial placemaking. Whether in Scotland, Virginia, or Jamaica, ‘principal inns’ contained the useful spaces and things that society’s ruling elites needed to establish and maintain power. Moreover, familiar in their sameness, from one inn to the next the material world experienced inside principal inns shaped elite inn-goers’ perceptions of place, confirming that here – wherever here was – was somewhere familiar, somewhere ‘civilised’, somewhere British.

Highly illustrated and drawing on extensive field studies, archival and literary sources, A Night at the Inn offers a new reading of the everyday places and spaces that made and sustained the British Empire, and whose legacies continue to reverberate today.

Edward Jones-Imhotep, The Broken Machine: Histories of Technology, Social Order, and the Self – MIT Press, May 2026 (print and open access)

A cultural history of technological breakdown, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic World.

The Broken Machine explores the intertwined histories of breaking machines, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic World. Edward Jones-Imhotep reveals how breakdowns are not the kinds of objects we imagine. More than just material failures or social disruptions, since the 18th century, breakdowns served as moments for defining a modern technological self and the core values of social order in Western democracies: what kinds of people belonged to it, what virtues they should possess, and who stood outside it.

Tracing this politics of breakdown and belonging across two centuries and two continents, the book rewrites five well-known episodes in the history of technology, influential histories that we thought we knew: the politics of the guillotine during the French Revolution, the causes of railway accidents and the rise of “systems” as a tool of self-responsibility and self-governance in Victorian Britain, the surprising antebellum history of breakdown in American slave cultures, the Gantt chart’s origins as a Progressive Era tool for linking failure as a condition of industrial machinery to failure as a kind of person in the US, and, finally, the electronic malfunctions during the Cold War that helped define the rational selves underpinning Western democracy.

Erin Torkelson, Predatory Welfare: Debt, Race, and Cash Transfers – Duke University Press, May 2026

In Predatory Welfare, Erin Torkelson explores how the direct cash transfer program instituted in South Africa revised and reworked post-apartheid racialized and gendered dispossession, despite its promise of ameliorating extreme poverty. Beginning in 2012, she focuses on how poor Black South African women asserted their entitlements to social assistance and responsibilities for familial care against the pressures of expropriation built into the grant payment system. Because the grants did not cover monthly bills, recipients were pushed into predatory loans collateralized by welfare payments. Torkelson finds that the state-sponsored but privately-run program was fundamentally undermined by its reliance on digital financial technologies which encoded wider forces of colonial rule, nationalist politics, and global development. Even when the government assumed control of grant payment in 2018, the neoliberal bent of fiscal policy continued to drive recipients into debt in new ways. Drawing on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork and organization—in grant payment queues, loan offices, grocery stores, Parliament, and the Constitutional Court—Torkelson demonstrates how cash transfers can offer a means to making racial capitalism more acceptable and how recipients can push back to demand reparation.

Leslie C. Dunn and Avi Mendelson eds. Shakespeare and Early Modern Madness – Springer, May 2026

Shakespeare and Early Modern Madness, the first collection to focus on madness and mental health in early modern drama, is energized by the belief that madness is a variable concept, situated among a rapidly shifting series of cultural vectors. In addition to investigating the ubiquity of mental health tropes in Shakespearean theater, and their appearance in plays by Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, the volume showcases Renaissance madness’s impressive variety: its affiliation with mental states as different as demonic possession, melancholic dreams, ecstasy and rapture, rage and fury, excessive grief, and aesthetic pleasure. The essays further demonstrate that madness in early modern drama can be approached through a diverse array of critical perspectives; their authors pull not only from historicist methodologies, disability studies, mad studies, and theories of gender and race, but also from the psychological and psychiatric sciences. The volume concludes with a section on activism and pedagogy, which asks how we can use early modern plays to promote the inclusion of students and scholars with lived experience of neurodiversity.