This book considers the history of globalization over the period 1550–1800, in particular the centrality of Britain to those globalizing processes. This history is told through a distinct focus upon the lives that constituted those connections and encounters that made the linkages of global relations material and lived. Ogborn reveals the multiple and contested connections through which tentative and uncertain points of contact were eventually superseded by more certain structures. In doing so, he makes clear the inequalities of power between individuals within these criss-crossing networks. These were connections that were the product of particular lives as well as ones that acted upon lives, both of those that directly constituted these connections and of others who were enrolled in them.

Ogborn’s introduction outlines the opportunities attendant upon restoring life to global history through the writing of lives – writings that complicate older narratives, the ‘big arguments’ (p. 4) that tend to gloss over the multiple connections of global processes. Following this, the book works through ten chapters, each focussing on a different set of processes and geographies of globalization over a period in which Britain became a global power. Ogborn begins by sketching out the nascent forms of globalization set in play in Elizabethan England, and moves on to consider settlement in North America, trade in the East Indies and the Atlantic, the labour of those who plied these maritime worlds as sailors, pirates, and others, the Atlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, the crusade for abolition, and the voyages of ‘discovery’ in the Pacific.

Each of the chapters follows a distinct structure, one where the broader processes of Britain’s globalizing role are tied to and told through short biographical sketches of those who made these global connections. These lives – briefly sketched in a series of short entries prior to the introduction – are both the familiar and obvious and the less so. Thus, Elizabeth I (Chapter 2), who is shown as a key instigator of many of the motifs of globalization over this period – colonial settlement, the transatlantic slave trade, and the establishment of chartered companies – sits alongside Essa Morrison (Chapter 6), whose life was entangled with global flows on the banks of the Thames, where she met a sailor recently returned to land, James Glass. The encounter led to Glass accusing her of theft. A court finding Morrison guilty, she became part of another set of global processes, as she was sentenced to transportation to North America. These lives also demonstrate how these processes were in a state of change, how the beneficiaries of them at one point in time became marginalized and ultimately eradicated by them, as, for example, the pirate-hunter-turned-pirate William Kidd (Chapter 7). The lives told are not just British ones but also those of people they encountered. Although often much less is known of the latter, they are shown to be just as important in the mediation of the processes described. For instance, Kasi Viranni (Chapter 4), an Indian merchant, was an indispensable conduit through which, in its early years of operation, the English East India Company traded. Even though he took advantage of the Company through the high profit margins he achieved in selling goods to them, their initial lack of knowledge and connections meant that they were dependent upon him. The telling of these lives clearly demonstrates the importance of Ogborn’s intention to put life back into global history, and the role that human decision and action have on what can otherwise appear as abstract processes.

The networked topography employed by Ogborn is useful in highlighting the multiple ways in which lives became global and how globalization occurred through a lived series of connections. This approach, however, also shows that the biographical necessarily needs to attend to the non-human, to objects that allow for human understandings of, and participation in, the worlds described. These objects are crucial elements of how the human subject relates to the world. It is through such human–non-human assemblages that human perception and intervention in the world are worked through, that make networks work. Ogborn describes the working of ships, some of ‘the most complex machines of their age’ (p. 147), in some detail. These were an intricate web of smaller technologies, a network in themselves, that had to be put to work if their potential for moving cargoes across distances was to be achieved (p. 146). And, of course, for others in these networks, they could hinder or reduce their potential to rework sets of connections. The interiors of ships engaged in the slave trade were designed with the intention of reducing their human cargo to the condition of any other commodity, partitions and shackles severely limiting the capacity of slaves to resist capture and transportation (pp. 212–13). Technologies can also act surprisingly, against their initial human intention. The interior configuration of these ships was later mobilized by abolitionists as an image of the inhumanity of the slave trade – a technology used to constrain being mobilized in an effort to liberate, and to end the trade (pp. 271–2). Such relations, then, are clearly central to the lives and processes sketched out in the book; they might, however, be usefully given more conceptual weight, showing agency as less human-centred and flowing through a series of connections that go beyond the human.

Written in an accessible and pithy manner, this book is an important text to those new to global history and should find its way onto the reading list of many a global history module. Each chapter ends with a useful list of ‘further reading’, pointing the reader to both general surveys and studies of the lives discussed. It should also appeal to the more established practitioners within the field, as an exemplary instance of how global history can be written differently. Reading that history through the lives of individuals, we become aware of the many and multiple processes and connections that were at play, ones that can too often be lost amid more aggregate renderings of the histories of globalization. Indeed, as Ogborn makes clear (p. 7), his account is very much a starting point, one that instances just a few of the many takes on globalization possible, and should act as a prompt for further research.