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

Humans in Shackles is a magisterial and encyclopedic history of transatlantic slavery—the largest human trafficking in history—and its implications for understanding the history of the modern world. Ana Lucia Araujo benefitted from nearly a century of scholarship, but she also transcends those studies. In Humans in Shackles, Araujo seeks to achieve three goals. First, to redress the distortions and imbalances in Atlantic history with its over-privilege of the British North Atlantic world. By bringing the full vigor of a South Atlanticist to the study of slavery, she places Brazil, not the thirteen American Colonies, at the core of the history of Atlantic history in the English-speaking world. Second, she embraces the well-established dictum of most Africanist historians that we cannot understand the lived experience of the enslaved men and women in the Americas without embracing “the long history of the African continent” (6). Third, Humans in Shackles is a tour de force on the lived experiences of enslaved men and women.

The Atlantic slave trade was the singular most important agent of change in West and Central African history between 1620 and 1850. The same can be said of the Americas and Western Europe, with minor adjustments to the periodization. Araujo provides an intimate view of the enslaved Africans’ world by combining primary sources from 23 archives in Brazil, Portugal, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with 110 published primary sources and hundreds of secondary literature in multiple European languages. With nineteen chapters, including an introduction and an epilogue, we are provided with riveting stories of the everyday lives of African bondsmen and women. Humans in Shackles covers familiar grounds in the full arc of Atlantic slavery, from the violence of capture, commodification, embarkation, and Middle Passage to the numerous ways in which the social acts of being enslaved played out in different economic and colonial regimes, from plantations to cities, the lives the enslaved made together and with their enslavers, including acts of resistance, liberation, and the forced or voluntary return to Africa. There are also chapters that focus on dying and death, trading in people, plantation work, gender, sex and sexual violence, family, motherhood, and religion. None of these topics is new in Atlantic history but Araujo succeeds in bringing them together in one volume.

There are two things students of Atlantic slavery would be grateful for in this book. First, Araujo gives us a brilliant synthesis that brings together up-to-date historiography of slavery in three languages traditions—English, French, and Portuguese. Second, Humans in Shackles demonstrates how Brazil and Portugal are indispensable to a full understanding of “the long and painful history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas” (7). After all, Portugal was responsible for nearly half of all enslaved Africans who arrived in the Americas. More than 95 percent of that number entered Brazil between 1550 and 1860. Araujo excavates many documentary sources to make her case, situating every chapter in transnational historiographies with minute but readable details.

Araujo’s framing of the book as an Atlantic cultural history reminds us of John Thornton’s A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820, which is primarily concerned with the processes of entanglements—conquest, colonization, and contact—between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Araujo’s approach is different. It is laser-focused on the African experience, slavery, and the slave trade in the Atlantic world and the interconnections of the geographies that constituted that world. However, like Thornton, the invocation of “cultural history” in Humans in Shackles is limited to the history of experience and everyday life. It is more about what the enslaved people did and what was done to them, and less about what the enslaved people thought or the meanings they gave their experience and the world around them, or the communication interactions through which ideas, meanings, signs, and symbols are generated to inform why and how the enslaved acted in the world the way they did.

I believe Araujo as a scholar of memory of the slave trade is aware of the need to conjoin practice with meaning in the study of cultural history. Perhaps it is convenient to limit this tome of 678 pages to matters of practice. Humans in Shackles is at its best in this limited engagement with social acts. It gives us a deep appreciation of the humanity of the dehumanized Africans whose labor, imagination, strategic choices, and resilience built the modern world. Araujo reminds us that the afterlives of slavery include more than European colonialism in Africa, scientific racism, genocide, and the prison industrial complex. The racist ideology of whiteness and global capitalism that originated from plantation capitalism continues to configure and restrict the place of Africa, Africans, and Black people in the modern world. For these reasons, the material conditions of African Americans are not different from those of their Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean kinspeople. And, together, these African Diasporas share similar material setbacks with the Africans in the homeland and elsewhere. The hovering of blackness at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and the persistent humiliation and inhumanity they suffer in the world cannot be explained without starting with the story of the Atlantic slave trade. Ana Lucia Araujo deserves our praises for this gift of a lucidly written book that takes us back to how it all started. Humans in Shackle is an excellent book to teach and think with.