Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ This new perspective on Colonial history centers the experiences and cultural influences of Indigenous people. On Savage Shores is a work of historical recovery . . . few books make as compelling a case for such a reimagining" — David Olusoga , GUARDIAN, Book of the Day

Why do you think history has traditionally focused on the experiences of the Europeans rather than those of the indigenous peoples? And yet, the Spanish legal system was remarkably fair. With the right prominent lawyer, a western slave could obtain freedom. Queen Isabella set the stage by first of all being disgusted, and then by declaring that all indigenous people from the new lands were free subjects of the Spanish Crown, her vassals, and therefore could not be enslaved.

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On Savage Shores offers a welcome non-Eurocentric narrative about how the great civilisations of the Americas discovered Europe . . . an important book”― INDEPENDENT Though part of the wider story of slavery, the enslavement of Indigenous American peoples is an aspect with which many in Europe might not be so familiar. What can you tell us about it?

A] fascinating and fluidly written revisionist history . . . This innovative and powerful account breaks down long-standing historical assumptions”― PUBLISHERS WEEKLY starred review A landmark work of narrative historythat shatters our previous Eurocentric understanding of the Age of Discovery by telling the story of theIndigenous Americans who journeyed across the Atlantic to Europe after 1492Some time in the early 1990s, during my first venture to grad school, I had a photo on my office wall of an Indigenous People’s demonstration in Cairns (or maybe Townsville) in North Queensland. Prominent in that mid-to-late-1980s picture was someone holding a placard that read ‘Aboriginal People discovered Captain Cook in 1770’. This agitated one of my fellow grad students, who was quite adamant that only the ‘explorer’ Cook could have made any discoveries because only he ‘left home’ and went looking, which caused me to wonder, who has agency here? I recall reflecting on the contrast with Alexander Fleming, whose ‘discovery’ of penicillin was, in the popular version of the story at least, the product of either an open window or a messy lab: it was a culture that by this popular account he stumbled on by accident when working on something else. Yet Fleming’s ‘discovery’ implicitly attributed agency to him, in a way my workmate refused to grant any agency to Indigenous people in what is now North Queensland. I teach on a range of early modern, Indigenous, American and colonial topics, as well as on public history and questions of decolonisation. I particularly enjoy encouraging students to engage with the relevance of history in the contemporary world. Teaching activities Undergraduate: And while Europeans were busy being amazed at these aliens, the Indigenous visitors were busy being horrified by European society. They saw Europe “with its rulers and beggars, opulence and starvation, supposed civility and extreme violence against its citizens – as a savage shore,” she says. They came from a cashless, sharing economy where none of that made any sense.

Europeans were eager for Native Americans to tell them the location of precious metals and the source of beaver pelts. But less practical Indigenous knowledge needed either to be assimilated into the existing intellectual scheme of the world or placed outside it as a monstrous anomaly. Like the jumbled artefacts in Renaissance Wunderkammern, Indigenous travellers to Europe were made into spectacles: ethnographic specimens and sensational sideshows. Guaraní children abducted from what is now southern Brazil and Paraguay were shipped to Portugal as ‘curiosities’, just as Inuk people from modern Canada made forced journeys to European cities. In 1566, when a man from Nunatsiavut was murdered trying to defend his family, his wife became ‘raving and mad’ at the prospect of leaving behind their seven-year-old daughter. So mother and child were both taken to Antwerp to be gawped at in their sealskin clothes. An Inuk hunter was brought to London in 1576 and hastily subjected to the European gaze – painted by a Flemish artist and togged up in English apparel – before he died, possibly of pneumonia. The presence of four Mohawk and Mahican chiefs at a West End performance of Macbeth in 1710 proved so distracting to the audience that their seats were moved onstage where they could be seen clearly without commotion. I greatly appreciate how careful and thoughtful the author is about her terminology and about not taking stories farther than primary sources allow. But it's really hard to get those voices. We know they were there (in Spain, in England), but what did they really think? It's hard to write a book around inferences. The book explores stories like those of Nutaaq, a tiny Inuk (Inuit) baby, who is represented in the paintings of John White. Brought to England in 1577, he was put on display at a London pub, but tragically died after only eight days in the capital. He was buried in an unmarked grave at St Olave’s, a tiny church that still stands on the corner of Seething Lane in the City. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. She also reveals that some of them never left. Their remains lie in cemeteries across Europe. In the churchyard of St Olave’s in the City of London, for example, not far from where Samuel Pepys was later to be laid to rest, are the graves of two Inuit people who died in London in the 1570s, having been abducted from their homeland in what is today Canada.A] fascinating and fluidly written revisionist history . . . This innovative and powerful account breaks down long-standing historical assumptions" ― PUBLISHERS WEEKLY starred review There were certainly Indigenous rulers, nobles and diplomats in the Atlantic world – glamorous kings and imposing ambassadors – but there were also many people of the most ordinary sort, people whose presence barely merited a mention in the annals of history. Only by accumulating many tiny slivers of these lives, which touched so many but have seemingly made so shallow an imprint on western traditions, can we start to build a picture of the past that sees these travellers as they were – sometimes remarkable, and at other times mundane – but above all there." For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.