Book; Dawn Watch https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/01/17/long-read-review-the-dawn-watch-joseph-conrad-in-a-global-world-by-maya-jasanoff/
In her smoothly written and ingeniously constructed new book, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff offers the life and work of the novelist Joseph Conrad as a tool with which to untangle the railroads, steamship routes and telegraph cables that made the world smaller in the nineteenth century. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 to Polish nationalists in exile in imperial Russia, Conrad spent the first 40 years of his life as a young immigrant in London and as a sailor in the French and British merchant marines. In the late 1890s he settled permanently in England and began his career as a novelist. Conrad’s personal history and geography, from Russia to the Congo, Jasanoff argues, shows a ‘global world’ in the making: his fiction offers a meditation on coping with that new world. Since most of Conrad’s papers are from his writing life, Jasanoff finds Conrad’s maritime life by triangulating between archival records, broader historical contexts and four of his most famous novels, The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, published between 1899 and 1907.