Part of review forum on “Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery”

Ana Lucia Araujo’s Humans in Shackles has a prominent place beside the very best longue durée histories of Atlantic slavery. The volume begins in the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese first violently removed people from Africa’s coast, and it takes the reader through to the present. It explores how people were enslaved in Africa, the Atlantic crossing, and slavery, abolition, and slavery’s aftermath across the Americas and Europe. Araujo does all of this with primary and secondary sources, oral history, and observations about public memory in a host of languages—English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish.

Among the things I found refreshing in the book was Araujo’s decision to center the lives of named enslaved individuals. To be sure, Araujo often paints with a broad brush, explaining the demographic and economic impact of the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans across time and space. But she illustrates her larger points with short biographies about people. Among those is the story of Maria, an enslaved West Central African who killed her one-year-old toddler Ricardo and her five-year-old daughter Cecilia in Rio Grande do Sul. Araujo uses the tragic story to explore the unique pain, including rape, that enslaved women endured and the lengths they went to find a way out for themselves and their children. It is these short life histories that help readers comprehend the impact of larger historical processes and that weigh heavily on their minds.

Women are the subject of many of Araujo’s short biographies, which is rare for longue durée histories of the Atlantic. Indeed, in Humans in Shackles, Araujo frequently details women’s unique suffering and delves deeply into their approaches to resistance, which arose from their positions as mothers and workers carrying out gendered tasks, and from cultural understandings they carried with them from Africa and passed on through dynamic processes to their daughters. Araujo also demonstrates enslaved women’s agency. To be sure, she explores the power of male elites of European descent, but Humans in Shackles is about how enslaved people, particularly women, shaped and were shaped by the institution of slavery. Araujo does not romanticize human agency. Rather, she foregrounds the suffering of enslaved people and stresses the limitations that slave systems placed on them, all the while revealing the world that enslaved people made for themselves and their communities. She does this by exploring, among other things, shipmate bonds, marriages, childrearing, and participation in festivals, funerals, and religious brotherhoods in Brazil and across the Americas.

There are a great many decisions that an author has to make when writing any book, and one of those decisions centers on organization. Araujo organizes her book both geographically and topically. She begins in Africa and explores the topics of “Violent Encounters,” “Catching People,” and “Trading in Humans.” She then examines the Atlantic crossing before transitioning to the bulk of the book, which focuses on the lives of people of African descent in the Americas, especially Brazil, and in Europe. The Americas section of the book is divided into topical chapters such as “Sex and Violence,” “Creating and Re-creating Families,” and “Mothers in Shackles.” This organizational approach allows Araujo to detail the shared experiences of Africans and people of African descent in their homelands and diaspora—their violent encounters, their capture and shipment to the coast, their lives on plantations and in cities, their oppression, their resistance, their family and community building, and their fights for freedom. However, the focus on shared experiences across Africa, Europe, and the Americas necessarily glosses over the uniqueness of enslaved people’s individual and collective experiences and provides limited analysis of the differences among slave systems. This is perhaps something that the book will be criticized for. But no book can do it all, and what a focus on similarities does is allow us to better understand elements that distinguished New World slavery from slaveries that came before and to understand some of what unified and unifies people in the Atlantic’s African diaspora—a shared trauma and shared resilience across time and space.

Finally, Araujo’s study breaks with many earlier longue durée studies of Atlantic slavery by emphasizing culture and particularly enslaved peoples’ cultural connections to Africa. To be sure, the book explores the working lives of Africans, but Araujo stresses that work was not all that shaped enslaved people’s lives. Indeed, Humans in Shackles begins in Africa, revealing where Atlantic Africans originated and maintains a focus on “how enslaved people’s past and ongoing connections with the African continent mattered” (13).

Scholars will learn a great deal from the book, and because it is well written and avoids jargon, I will be assigning it to graduate and undergraduate students and recommending it to anyone who wants to expand their understanding of the history of Atlantic slavery.