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Senior commissioning editor Alpana Sajip has snapped up her first deal for Picador, the literary imprint of Pan Macmillan, with a pre-empt for Dr Misha Ewen’s début trade book Imperial Ties: An Intimate History of Women and the British Empire. Sajip pre-empted UK and Commonwealth rights from Charlotte Seymour at Johnson and Alcock.
Ewen was inspired to write the book after she discovered a shocking family story back in 2017. She discovered that her six-times great-grandmother, Myrtilla, who was born in Africa, had, when a young woman, been captured and imprisoned for weeks in a dungeon on the Gold Coast before being enslaved on a coffee plantation in Jamaica. However, when slavery was abolished, the mixed-race daughter of a formerly enslaved woman, Sarah Church, was the one who received compensation for the loss of her "property", including Myrtilla and her children.
This discovery sparked a journey of discovery for Ewen, and led to her writing Imperial Ties. The publisher said it was "a landmark work that challenges us to see women as the perpetrators, as well as the victims, of colonial violence and exploitation".
The synopsis continues: "Imperial Ties is not a celebratory story of women’s agency, nor a sympathetic account of feminine accomplishment. It is a troubling history of how women were not just intimately embroiled and personally complicit in British expansion, but key to its success."
Sajip said: "Imperial Ties is an essential and compellingly told history that will change how people understand the British Empire and its legacy. Misha deftly draws together fascinating vignettes and characters to create a sweeping, panoramic history that recentres women as both willing and forced protagonists in British imperial expansion. For many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of empire who carry their history with them, stories like these are deeply personal; Misha is the perfect guide to take readers along with her on this journey. I can’t wait to publish this at Picador.”
Ewen said: “When I made my discovery about Myrtilla and Sarah, it opened new questions for me about women’s fraught complicity in empire. For a long time, I’ve wanted to bring this personal story, and that of other women who were embroiled in empire, to a wider audience. Alpana understood straight away what it means to have inherited these histories, and why they need to be told, so I couldn’t be more thrilled to publish with Picador.”