The first book to be published in 2025 that has been indexed by Southwest Humanities is Caroline Fowler’s important new work, Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art (Duke University Press, 2025). Examining the fundamental role played by the transatlantic slave trade in the development of the Dutch art world in the seventeenth century, this book “argues that the rise of the transatlantic slave trade created a visual field of uncertainty around picturing the transformation of life into property,” thereby demonstrating “how the emergence of landscape, maritime, and botanical painting were deeply intertwined with slavery’s economic expansion.” Drawing from natural history, inventories, and legal theory of the era alongside twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought and poetry (including African diaspora studies and Black feminism), Fowler convincingly shows how “the oeuvres of artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Hercules Segers, Frans Post, Johannes Vermeer, and Maria Sibylla Merian and therefore inescapably within slavery’s grasp.” Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art will be available for purchase on 7 January 2005. For more information about this title, please see the publisher’s website here.