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Just finished "The Empire of Necessity" by Greg Grandin, the author of "Fordlandia". Grandin uses the narrative of a slave revolt on the ship "Tryal" off Peru in 1805 to talk primarily about the expansion of the African slave trade in Latin America in the late 1700s and early 1800s, as well as the extermination of fur seals in in the Southern Ocean by Yankee sealers, debt peonage in early republican New England, and Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" and "Benito Cereno".
"Benito Cereno", published in 1855, is based on the uprising on the "Tryal"; Melville's main source was the memoir of the Yankee sealing captain who crushed the uprising and returned the surviving slaves to slavery and execution.
Like "Moby Dick", the narrative is not linear, there are frequent digressions which have some relationship to the main story.
Altogether, very well written and the most interesting thing I have read so far this year.
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