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

Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery is intended to make three interventions. First, the book centers Brazil in the history of slavery in the Americas. Second, it emphasizes the continuous role of West Africa and West Central Africa in the tragic history of the trade in enslaved Africans. Third, it focuses on enslaved women in the long history of slavery in the Americas. Whereas most slavery scholars acknowledge that Brazil imported the largest number of enslaved Africans to the Americas, while West Central Africa exported the highest number of captive Africans to the Americas, many students and academics still believe that the greatest number of African captives arrived in the United States during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. This misleading emphasis has led most academic monographs to concentrate on the history of slavery in the United States and the British Caribbean, while overlooking the significance of Brazil and the history of Atlantic Africa. Moreover, existing academic works on slavery and the Atlantic slave trade have consistently neglected the history of enslaved women, which has been covered in separate books, often authored by Black women historians. These gaps are even more evident in the very few trade books aimed at general audiences that analyze the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, all of which focus solely on the English-speaking North Atlantic system. Humans in Shackles challenges this long-lasting trend that has dominated books for general readers.

As any other work of synthesis, Humans in Shackles relies on the sizable scholarly literature in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish produced during the past two centuries. To do so, as noted by Mariana P. Candido, the book includes new research while also relying on the existing scholarship. As I provide these broad strokes, I also illuminate specific examples, moving back and forth from a macro perspective to the smaller scale of the individual stories of enslaved men and women.

Walter Hawthorne notes that my focus on the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children erases the singularity of their individual and collective experiences and therefore limits my examination of the differences among slave systems. Although I made efforts to illuminate existing discrepancies, it is probably impossible to write a synthetic book without focusing on the major elements that linked, rather than separated, slave societies and societies where slavery existed in the Americas.

Akin Ogundiran notes that my approach to the cultural history of slavery in the Americas is evocative and relies more on practices and much less on meanings. But culture is also about practices. As Mariana P. Candido notes, Humans in Shackles also emphasizes technology and knowledge transfers, including farming, trading, and smelting. James H. Sweet would like to see much more about Africa in the book. Although, I could have done more, the book discusses Vodun and Orisha religions in four chapters when exploring the processes of enslavement in Atlantic Africa, especially when discussing the Kingdom of Dahomey, Afro-Brazilian, and Afro-Cuban religions such as Candomblé, funerary rituals, and burial practices as well as food traditions. African languages are often explored as well. For example, I discuss the term mondongo (a tripe stew), which possibly derives from the Kikongo terms mungungu and mundungu, and which is also related to the toponym Mondongo in the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo. I also explore the term kitanda in Kimbundu (quitanda in Portuguese), both referring to open markets where African women and their enslaved descendants operated in the Americas and Atlantic Africa. African languages are also present in my discussion of the term kilombo and of African names. Furthermore, nowhere in the book do I refer to Palmares as a representative of the Portuguese colonial state. Similarly, despite not referring to Cartagena, Panama City, and Havana as “African cities,” I largely emphasize the central role of Africans, their descendants, and their cultures in these communities. Humans in Shackles actually shows that Kikongo, Fon, and Yoruba languages crossed the Atlantic Ocean with the men, women, and children who spoke these African languages. Nowhere in the book do I describe the persistence of ideas connected to specific words in African languages as “slave culture.” I rather highlight how Africa shaped countries like Brazil, even beyond the end of the era of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. I also believe that the majority of Africanist scholars who are not slavery scholars will learn a great deal from Humans in Shackles.

Lorelle Semley meditates on specific words, such as resistance. As a historian, this term better conveys individual and collective actions explored in the book through a long period and across different regions, rarely covered by theorists such as Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt. In short, resistance and refusal are not exclusive, but rather embedded, entangled. As censorship attempts to ban the history of slavery in universities, museums, and funding agencies, showcasing the names of slave owners and slave traders in the text is an effort to name the perpetrators. The history of slavery in the Americas is not solely the story of enslaved peoples; it is also the history of those who committed atrocities that must not be forgotten. As Semley points out, Humans in Shackles is also about all of us. And I hope my book inspires many other women historians to write other big history books.