Though his life was tragically cut short, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966–2015) was a trailblazer in the fields of Spanish imperial and Atlantic histories. His numerous monographs, chapters, and articles combined to demonstrate that “Spain's nineteenth-century empire was intertwined with similar empires in the age of abolition, free trade, proconsular despotism, and second slavery” (pp. 4–5). This volume evolved out of two initially unrelated conference panels organized to celebrate Schmidt-Nowara's life and scholarship. Editors Scott Eastman and Stephen Jacobson have collated 11 chapters that each engage different aspects of Schmidt-Nowara's work and legacy.
Eastman and Jacobson organize the collection into four sections. The first consists of a single chapter by Jacobson that charts Schmidt-Nowara's intellectual biography. Therein, Jacobson explains how, as a product of the reinvigorating studying of imperialism at the University of Michigan in the 1990s, Schmidt-Nowara was influenced by “smasher[s] of paradigms” including Rebecca Scott, Geoff Eley, Seymour Drescher, Josep...
