British
Edward Shawcross is a British historian of modern France and its empire. He studied at Oxford and later held academic posts in the United Kingdom, teaching nineteenth-century French history. His first book, France, Mexico and Informal Empire in Latin America, 1820-1867, examined French commercial and political ambitions in the region. He then wrote The Last Emperor of Mexico (2021), a narrative history of Maximilian and Carlota and the French intervention that placed them on a Mexican throne. The book draws on archives in several countries and was written for general readers as well as specialists. Shawcross has also written on the Second French Empire and on the links between European and Latin American politics in the nineteenth century. His work matters because it places a well-known royal tragedy inside the wider story of European imperial ambition and the rise of American power.