A compelling narrative, full of twists and turns, enticing locales, fascinating characters, and strange paradoxes. It spans two hemispheres, traverses the high-life of the aristocracy on the one hand, and the brutal low-life of Antipodean convicts on the other.
Iain McCalman, author of Darwin's Armada McKenzie is a rising star in the historical profession, and this important and original book makes impressively plain why this is so. It is that rare accomplishment: a major work of scholarship that also deserves to reach a broader public.
David Cannadine, author of Mellon: An American Life Aspects of the 19th century, as depicted in this work, could almost be read as a gothic mystery—with a clandestine marriage, anonymous letters, a European countess, and threats of disinheritance not to mention the swindling trickster, whose exploits bear witness to audacity in the face of adversity. However those gothic qualities should not overshadow the more serious aspects of the early 19th-century political power struggle between the abolitionist William Wilberforce and the slave trader Henry Lascelles… While McKenzie's text is based on solid research, it is engaging and offers a new interpretation of the corresponding attitudes, fears, and suspicions in both the metropole and the periphery.
Tina Picton Phillipps
BBC History
A Swindler's Progress is a highly gripping narrative, its sociological insights conveyed largely through a series of striking human dramas.
Matthew Reisz
Times Higher Education