The African Atlantic: West African Literatures and Slavery Studies

Slavery in cities created unique communities of coercion, and the study of urban slavery in coastal West Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries combines three sometimes distinct fields: histories of the Atlantic slave trade, African slavery, and the study of urban history in West Africa. The study of urban slavery in West Africa provides unique insights into the impact of cities on forced labor and how these labor relations shaped the growth and evolution of urban space. The urban history of coastal West Africa became entangled with the Atlantic slave trade beginning in the 15th century, but it is also an outcome of longer regional histories of urbanism. From northern Senegal to southeastern Nigeria, coastal communities that had once been on the periphery of larger interior settlements grew in importance with the expansion of Atlantic commerce that by the 18th century was dominated by slave trading. By putting slavery and urban history into the same analytical framework, scholars have explored distinctions between rural, plantation, and city-based slavery, while also exploring the ways in which these cities are tied to the West African interior and the wider Atlantic world. In distinguishing between the experiences of men and women, and the impact of age on slavery, they have shown how urban slavery was often characterized by the paradoxes of forced labor and increased mobility and autonomy. To review the nature and evolution of urban slavery over time and space in these towns and cities, scholars draw on conclusions from the literature on cities on the West African coast: including Saint Louis du Senegal, Cape Coast, Ouidah, Lagos, Bonny, and Old Calabar.

Reviewed by: Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula by Benjamin Reilly Alan Mikhail Benjamin Reilly. Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. x + 211 pp. Ill. $28.95 (978-0-8214-2182-6). The main thesis of this book is that malarial conditions produced in the agricultural zones of the Arabian Peninsula led to a reliance on imported African slave laborers since they proved more able than locals to resist malaria. Tightly focused on proving this thesis, this short book zooms in on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though it often makes forays much further back in time. The analysis is strictly material, epidemiological, and ecological. Slavery is an economic system of productive agricultural labor in this book, not a cultural or human institution made up of individual lives. Reilly builds his argument systematically, literally from the ground up. Chapters 1 and 2 offer a wonderful account of the complexities of irrigation, agriculture, and slave and non-slave labor in the Arabian Peninsula. After a case study in chapter 3, the book’s analytical argument continues in chapter 4 where we come to see how African slaves were the keys to making malarial agricultural regions viable and productive. The final chapter argues that Arabia’s slave system was not a temporary phenomenon, but rather a fundamental component of its history and economy, one that would eventually be inscribed even in the very genes of the peninsula’s peoples. The achievements of this book are many. Empirically, Reilly adds rich detail to our still adolescent understanding of the agricultural history of the Arabian Peninsula. Oil and religion dominate the region’s historiography. There are, however, obviously other—often older—stories to tell, and Reilly gives us some of them. The details of irrigation systems, bustan gardening, and geographic zones are all extremely useful. The book succeeds too in arguing against the dominant understanding of slavery in the Middle East and North Africa—namely, that it was overwhelmingly concentrated on domestic slavery and concubinage. Historians have long drawn a distinction between slavery in the Muslim world and slavery in the Americas. If the latter was based almost entirely on extractive labor for the cultivation of cash crops, the former aimed at serving an elite, producing offspring, and staffing a military. Reilly shows us in fact that the two systems were not as different as we might think. African slaves were used for agriculture in the Middle East, or at least in the Arabian Peninsula, and primarily for one of the same reasons they were in the Americas—their adapted resistance to malaria. With this intervention, Reilly should be commended for bringing the Middle East more squarely into studies of global slavery and the African diaspora. The book also serves as a longer history of forced labor migration and displacement in the Arabian Peninsula. The majority of the people living in many of the peninsula’s countries today are non-citizen migrant laborers from South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and other parts of the Middle East. Long before the coercive power of our era’s global wealth disparities, the Arabian Peninsula’s servile labor regime, as Reilly shows, had been forcibly imported from outside of the region. Throughout the book, Reilly is very clear that sources are a problem. “The study of Arabian Peninsula history,” he writes, “obliges one to be as flexible and [End Page 728] creative as possible with the relatively small amount of available evidence” (p. 127). Ultimately the book’s wonderfully “flexible and creative” attempts to overcome the source problem, using everything from genetics to poetry, is also its greatest weakness. Can a study of slavery in colonial French North Africa really be used to illuminate the situation in the Arabian Peninsula? How well exactly can Indian Ocean slave numbers be used as a proxy for the scale of the trade in the Arabian Peninsula? Perhaps more problematic than these sorts of proxy questions is Reilly’s near total reliance on European and American travel literature and British colonial sources. To his credit, Reilly is very upfront about the shortcomings of his source base and in explaining how and why...

Slavery studies have focused overwhelmingly on the Atlantic slave trade (Miller 1999) wherein between circa 1500 and 1880 some 12.5 million sub-Saharans, mostly young adult West African males (Lovejoy 2012) were shipped to New World plantations and mines, where they formed a concentrated chattel class that constituted the basis of a slave mode of production (Davis 1970; Patterson 1982; Meillassoux 1991). Scholars investigating slavery in the Indian Ocean world (IOW) have largely applied paradigms and perspectives derived from Atlantic slavery studies, and concentrated their attention on the east African slave trade to Arab- and European-run enterprises (e.g. Cooper 1997; Harms et al. 2013) and on the African slave diaspora in the IOW (Jayasuriya and Pankhurst 2003; Jayasuriya and Angenot 2008; Hawley 2008). The African slave export trade is generally held to have constituted an inequitable exchange whereby Arabs and Europeans took East Africa’s prime human resources, and valuable raw materials such as ivory and gold, in return for cheap, generally low-quality cloth and other manufactures, thus creating what some have termed a “proto-colonial” system that established the basis for the “underdevelopment” of the continent (Sutton 1972: 11).

Reviewed by: Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling by Benjamin N. Lawrance Craig Hollander (bio) Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. By Benjamin N. Lawrance. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. 376. Cloth, $85.00.) Many scholars are already familiar with the saga of the Africans from La Amistad. But don’t let such familiarity with the episode keep you from reading Benjamin N. Lawrance’s new book, Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. Focusing on African child slaves, the book provides a fresh perspective on both the Amistad affair and the illegal African slave trade to Cuba during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. With good reason, Lawrance takes issue with those who characterize the period as an “age of abolition.” On the contrary, he argues that it constituted “the beginning of an age of child enslavement” (7). In 1997, the superstar director Steven Spielberg released the film Amistad, which portrayed the ordeal of 53 African slaves who staged a successful insurrection onboard a Cuban slave ship called La Amistad in 1839. Although the Africans sought to sail the ship to Africa, they wound up near Long Island. They were detained in Connecticut and then subjected to a drawn-out legal battle for their liberty. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Africans, enabling 35 of them to journey back to Africa in 1842. Not surprisingly, Spielberg’s spotlight on the Amistad affair drew both popular and scholarly attention. David Brion Davis began his book Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006) with a description of the famous revolt and the various legal issues surrounding it. And it was only a couple years ago that Marcus Rediker published The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York, 2013). Lawrance recounts in Amistad’s Orphans the same narrative as previous works concerning the Amistad affair. And, at times, he tries to relitigate the case on behalf of the Africans (perhaps if only to demonstrate his exhaustive research into African dialects). For the most part, though, Lawrance’s book is only about the Amistad affair insofar as it produced sources about six children from Sierra Leone: Covey, Antonio, Ka’le, Te’me, Kag’ne, and Margru. Lawrance employs the extant information about these children—“Amistad’s orphans,” as he refers to them [End Page 846] collectively—to explore “the African child slave experience and [reevaluate] the centrality of child mobility to the massive illegal trafficking enterprise undergirding the nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic slave trade” (5). “With the requisite contextual information,” he assures, “the lives of Amistad’s orphans can, and do, speak to the broader experience of tens of thousands of others enslaved during the nineteenth century” (46). In Amistad’s Orphans, Lawrance asserts that the experience of African child slaves in the illegal slave trade has been “misunderstood” (5). He is being too generous. Few scholars have ever sought in earnest to understand whether African child slaves experienced the traffic differently than their adult counterparts. Yet children comprised a significant portion of the African slave trade (roughly one-fifth of the total number of captives). Moreover, the percentage of children in the traffic increased over time. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century—when the African slave trade to Cuba was purportedly illegal—children constituted more than a third of the total number of captives. Several scholars have suggested that this demographic shift must have resulted from a change on the supply (African) side. After all, wouldn’t most slave traders prefer to purchase adult males, rather than women and children? Not so, says Lawrance. “Slave children,” he contends, were “highly prized, specifically targeted, and exceptionally valuable investments” (29). The question, then, is why would traffickers want them? According to Lawrance, slave traders sought to purchase African children because they viewed child slaves as more “coercible” than adults— meaning that they were easier to enslave, more controllable, and less likely to rebel. It also stands to reason that such “coercibility” became more desirable during the illegal...

Césaire and the Challenge of Translation: The Example of “Strong Men” by Sterling Brown

Book Review| September 01 2006 Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953 Riché Richardson Riché Richardson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2006) 78 (3): 627–629. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-033 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Riché Richardson; Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953. American Literature 1 September 2006; 78 (3): 627–629. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-033 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage by Sowande' M. Mustakeem Alex Borucki (bio) Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. By Sowande' M. Mustakeem. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Pp. xvii, 262. $95.00 cloth; $25.95 paper) This innovative book broadens the emergent scholarship on the slave trade by emphasizing the experiences of women and children [End Page 113] who endured the forced Atlantic crossings alongside adult African men. Inspired by the works of Stephanie Smallwood, Saidiya Hartman, and Marcus Rediker, this book situates the slave vessel at the center of the process of commodification of humans, or as the author defines it, the "making and unmaking of black bodies" (p. 7). Thus, this work provides new interpretations about the intersection of violence and capitalism in the history of the slave trade. The structure of this book follows others that often begin in Africa, continue with sections about African experiences in slave ships, and finish with the sale of captives in the Americas. The first chapter examines the process of enslavement in Africa, where the interaction of white merchants and African elites led to the "production of terrorizing environments" (p. 34). There, the white quest for financial gains as well the transformation of these profits into political power by African elites fractured African social and normative ways of reverence for human life. Chapter two, which focuses on how white merchants and captains marketed black bodies, examines white imaginings of slaves as commodities rather than the African experiences of starvation, cruelty, and death in slave vessels, all of which the author analyzes later in the third chapter. Entitled "Blood Memories," chapter four portrays slave ships not only as floating prisons but also as "mobile battlefields," as it provides details about slave resistance and particularly the role of captive women in these insurrections (p. 77). Chapter five moves to one the most extreme forms of resistance, suicide in slave vessels, through the examination of familial separation of captives and the gendering of psychological instability. The following chapter enriches our understanding of Africans experiencing diseases in these ships. Often deemphasized by other studies, an examination of the violent environment surrounding the sale of captives in the Americas after disembarkation forms the final chapter of the book. This concluding chapter focuses on less-studied populations like children and aged captives, who could become "refuse slaves" in the brutal market of human flesh. This excellent work illustrates the paradoxical significance of U.S. [End Page 114] slavery studies in relation to the larger African Diaspora. Even though the importance of slavery studies in the United States has encouraged scholarship on this subject in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, normative U.S. understandings of the African experiences in the Atlantic world sometimes mischaracterize these historical processes. For instance, the use of the term "Middle Passage" in this book, to encapsulate the experiences of captives in all slave vessels, exemplifies these Anglo-American normative views. As readily available research shows, more enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil than in the British Caribbean and the United States combined, and the same is true for the Spanish Americas, where more captives arrived than in the British colonies. Neither the Atlantic crossing of captives to Brazil or to the Spanish Americas fit the term "Middle Passage" based on the triangular trade, given that most of the slave voyages arriving in Brazil were bi-modal (departing from Brazil to Africa and then back to Brazil). And for the slave voyages arriving in the Spanish colonies, most of them involved some intercolonial and transimperial routes (e.g., from British Jamaica to Spanish Veracruz) in combination with forced treks across Mexico and South America. Even Cuba was part of these complicated slave trade networks before the emergence of the nineteenth-century Cuban-based traffic. This may be seen as a critique about the scope rather than the interpretation of this book, as the analysis of this work pushes new, exciting boundaries for scholars examining the slave trade outside of the United States and the British Caribbean. To be fair, the author acknowledges her lack of engagement with the history...

Archaeological examination of the transatlantic slave trade in West Africa largely began with investigations of European trade posts and forts on the coast and on major West African rivers. The predominant focus of subsequent work has been on African states and societies affected by or involved in Atlantic commerce and the slave trade. Major themes of research include African–European interactions and trade, political and economic effects in African societies, and the integration and consumption of Atlantic goods in daily life. Work has also expanded geographically beyond West African towns and states into hinterland and frontier landscapes far from the coast. Archaeological investigations of Atlantic era slavery developed in dialogue with the archaeology of the African diaspora in the Americas, yet their foci and objectives have not always been completely aligned. Slavery is more of a central theme in African diaspora archaeology—being the primary formative historical force in the creation of the diaspora—than it is in West African archaeology, where it is more often examined as a major feature of social, political, and economic life with uneven regional and societal effects. Archaeologists are also involved in the study, interpretation, and politics of African diaspora heritage tourism. Emerging approaches to the archaeology of Atlantic era slavery in West Africa include maritime archaeology and the archaeology of the formerly enslaved that returned to West Africa.

Reviewed by: Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature by Daniel Hack Hollis Robbins Daniel Hack, Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 304 pp. $35.00. Anyone who works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American literature knows how necessary it is to keep a bookshelf nearby of all of the works of classical, biblical, and British literature that African American authors have cited, critiqued, reworked, or simply alluded to since Phillis Wheatley began the practice in 1773, referencing Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and a host of others. Some writers provide a handy list of authors, as Frederick Douglass did in 1845, directing readers to The Columbian Orator (over two dozen, from Cicero to Franklin!), or as Charles Chesnutt did in 1900, in listing the Great Books on John Warwick’s bookshelf in The House behind the Cedars (a dozen more, including Milton, Cervantes, and Scott). The canon of African American literature is so very rich and was for so very long ignored by literature scholars outside of historically black colleges and universities (who have always read works by black writers now tagged as “little known”), that the work of excavating, uncovering, and republishing literature by African American writers—along with the work of reading these texts in conversation with other African American texts—has been the primary aim of African American literature scholars for the past several decades. As the bookshelves filled with African American literature have expanded, so too has that other bookshelf, the one holding Ovid, Burns, Scott, and other texts black authors have alluded to. The ongoing task of analyzing the ways that these bookshelves are in conversation with each other is increasingly daunting. Accordingly, Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New is warmly welcome, with its detailed readings of African American literary engagement with Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, [End Page 62] and others. Reaping Something New details so many of the myriad ways that African American authors throughout the nineteenth century read, drew upon, deliberately misread, toyed with, signified upon, contended with, dismissed, and admired Victorian works of literature that, perhaps unintentionally, Hack quickly ends up contradicting his own central argument that these engagements were “unlikely” (1). From Wheatley onward, African American literature has been in deep, playful, and abiding conversation with the broader literary canon as key scholars on the category of African American literature from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to Kenneth Warren have argued. One of Hack’s tremendous contributions, in fact, is to gather together the many strands of scholarship on African American literary engagement with (primarily) British texts and present them meticulously, systematically, and thoroughly, arguing for a process he calls the “African Americanization” of these texts. “African Americanizations,” Hack argues, “make newly salient the specific ways and ends to which Victorian novels and poems do or do not represent individuals of African descent (and members of nonwhite races more generally) . . . [and] can also call into question the importance of race in texts in which it has always seemed central” (3). Hack sees African American writers’ engagement with Victorian texts as “close reading at a distance” (3). He offers new ways to look at Victorian texts and new ways to understand African American literature from specific, granular examples. Hack’s chapters reflect his training as a Victorianist and his emphasis on the two-way street of African American and Victorian textual engagement. In his Introduction, he begins to demonstrate his method by looking at the first paragraph of Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892), in which Cooper inserts three lines from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), without attribution but with a provocative italicization: “An infant crying in the night, / An infant crying for the light; / And with no language—but a cry.” Closely reading this fruitful engagement yields a richer understanding of Cooper, of Tennyson, and of the various scholars and critics over the years who have seen, not seen, or misunderstood the allusion (though surely not “suppressed” [6]). Next, chapter one, “Close Reading Bleak House at a Distance,” offers an updated version of Hack’s 2008...

African American didactic literature represents a richly diverse and immeasurably significant part of African American communication, culture, and history. However, this discourse has largely been neglected by both rhetorical and literary critics. The author's aim in this essay is to discover how rhetorical criticism can illuminate this significant part of African American communication and culture by reading it as epideictic rhetoric that serves an ethical purpose, specifically the edifying and shaping of character, both individually and communally. His argument is that looking at African American didactic literature as epideictic offers advantages to the critic by way of providing a generic foundation and frame of reference that help to understand the discourse both as literature and as rhetoric. A textual analysis of Claude McKay's (1953) antilynching poem If We Must Die will demonstrate how recognizing the ethical issues involved in African American didactic literature can promote critical understanding of some ways that such discourse contributes to the building and affirming of community values and identity.

In this article I question whether or not African American young adult literature serves as a primer for, and a version of, African American adult literature. Using the Black Aesthetic as my literary theory and the Coretta Scott King Award as the young adult canon, I note that while the content of adolescent literature is consistent with the tenets of the Black Aesthetic and African American adult literature, the literary elements and style are not. As such, young readers of African American young adult literature are not necessarily prepared for the literary elements and style of canonical African American adult literature. Further, I note that editors, publishers, and literary critics may contribute to the construction of young adult literature, in that editors may discourage authors from experimenting with form and style. Finally, I call for reorienting Black children’s and adolescent literature away from White literary elements and style and toward Black literary elements and style.

Book Review| March 01 2010 Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression; Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture between the Wars Michael Tavel Clarke Michael Tavel Clarke Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2010) 82 (1): 211–213. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-086 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Tavel Clarke; Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression; Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture between the Wars. American Literature 1 March 2010; 82 (1): 211–213. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-086 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

The reference to Antera Duke of Old Calabar in HA 16 (1989) encourages me to contribute a note on this historical notable.1 A gross imbalance exists in the scholarly study of black slavery. The shelves of academic libraries groan under the weight of books on black slavery in the Americas. Yet for every hundred books on trans-Atlantic black slavery and the Middle Passage, there is at best a single volume on black slavery in Africa. Moreover, the curt preliminary chapter dealing with slavery in Africa mandatory in books on black slavery in the Americas, not uncommonly limits itself to repeating anachronistic moralizing cliches that show little awareness of up-to-date Africanist knowledge of slavery in Africa—and exhibit little empathy with past African enterprise. There is some excuse. Any historical social process shared between preliterate and literate societies will inevitably have fuller and clearer source material in respect of the latter than in respect of the former. Information on black slavery in the Americas, on the Middle Passage, and on the non-African aspects of the procurement of slaves, is relatively abundant; information on the transmission of an individual African from an earlier non-slave situation, through the hands of Africans, to the point where he or she was handed over to non-Africans, is almost nonexistent. This being so, the publication in 1956 of the diary of an African slave trader, Antera Duke of Old Calabar, a diary covering the years from 1785 to 1788, was an outstanding historiographical event.

Reviewed by: The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730–1865 by M. Scott Heerman David Roediger (bio) The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730–1865. By M. Scott Heerman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 248. Cloth, $45.00.) This brisk and elegant book charts what its author calls the "entangled history of human bondage in one region that foregrounds how different iterations of enslavement mutually played out simultaneously" (7–8). The region is the Illinois Country and later the state of Illinois, often especially its southern third. The entanglements are with indigenous presence; transatlantic and internal slave trades; the empires of France, Britain, and the United States; and the bordering empire of Spain for a time. As such, The Alchemy of Slavery is important as a local study of slavery and emancipation and at the same time a significant contribution to transimperial and even borderlands history. Heerman also offers critical reflections on law and social relations, showing how statutes and litigation did not simply shape practice but became a terrain of struggle between enslaved and enslavers. Paired with Tiya Miles's prizewinning The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (2017), The Alchemy of Slavery announces a new moment in grounding studies of the interpenetrations of slavery with settler colonialism. Heerman begins with an introduction setting forth the plot, but above all the variety of sorely oppressed and remarkably resistant characters, of his study. He situates them amid histories of slavery, particularly those paying close attention to change over time and across space. In this he follows closely the example of his great mentor, the late and missed Ira Berlin. The Alchemy of Slavery then moves to the period of French colonization of Illinois. During that long eighteenth-century period, enslaved people came into bondage variously, with the fundamental distinction being between those coming through a trade in American Indian captives, often women, and those coming as a result of trade in African slaves. The former exchanges often cemented relations with Indian tribes, who vastly outnumbered French settlers, but also carried risks of war when members of tribes were swept into slavery. The Catholic Church baptized the variously enslaved energetically, and in some cases intermarriage with settler men occurred. However, especially given the expansion of corn and meat production using slave labor, the emphasis remained on the continuation [End Page 105] of slavery, not its mitigation. The ruling elite was a slaveholding one, setting a pattern lasting through the period of British control and well into the U.S. one. With the coming of British rule after the Seven Years' War, the legal codes governing slavery changed, but not elite commitment to the system. Indeed, British imperial control began with a new infusion of enslaved African workers. With nominal control over Missouri falling to Spain, Illinois was a borderland in another way, creating new possibilities for planter control and for resistance from below. Most significantly, Heerman shows how changing demographics moved toward African labor and set the stage for collapsing complicated patterns of enslavement into a single "French Negro" category. Heerman then turns to the post-Revolution period, identifying it, as it must have been experienced by settlers and indigenous people in Illinois, as a third regime of imperial control. Indeed, there was briefly a 2.5 stage in which claims of Virginia to Illinois were enough honored to give it a measure of authority. The new U.S. empire developed the "French Negro" category as it "turned many slaveries into one" (3). The victory over Britain brought to Illinois the seemingly firm antislavery language of legislation organizing the Northwest Territory and new influxes of enslaved people, enslavers, and proslavery commitment. The very rich last three chapters of The Alchemy of Slavery describe the balance of forces that determined the course of gradual emancipation in a state that lacked any legislation setting a firm end date for slavery and that arrived at a clear position that children of "French Negroes" were free only through protracted struggle and litigation. Heerman resolutely insists that Illinois remained a slave society, run...

Reviewed by: Rebellious Passage: The “Creole” Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie Michael A. Schoeppner (bio) Rebellious Passage: The “Creole” Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade. By Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 345. Cloth, $99.99; paper $29.99.) Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie’s book is not the first study of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the Creole, but it is the best. While it includes the story of the nineteen individuals who led the revolt and the story of the diplomatic exchanges by well-known American and British politicians, neither group occupy center stage as they do in previous works. Rather, Kerr-Ritchie’s is an ensemble cast. He provides painstaking detail for his wide range of characters: the slave traders who invested in the American maritime slave trade, the Creole’s crew and “cargo,” the black Bahamians who escorted the formerly enslaved people ashore, British colonial officers, American and British diplomats, and even the lawyers who later litigated the insurance claims in Louisiana’s courtrooms. [End Page 258] Kerr-Ritchie deploys this large cast of characters to situate the Creole revolt within a broad political, social, and economic context. In the first and third chapters, for example, he explains the divergent trajectories of the American and British empires with regard to the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. The geographic proximity of the two empires, especially the British Caribbean and the American South, meant that these diverging political regimes were in frequent contact. The Creole, then, did not just sail the treacherous waters between Florida and the Bahamas, it traveled between two starkly different and increasingly antagonistic political regimes. Likewise, the second chapter situates the fateful Creole voyage within the broader scope of the American maritime slave trade. Kerr-Ritchie aptly demonstrates the continuity of the maritime slave trade before and after 1808. Enslaved people’s experiences of detachment, dread, and violence in the transatlantic slave trade had their counterparts in the interstate maritime trade. The fourth chapter traces the actual brig Creole from its initial construction to its ultimate demise in 1842. The boat was constructed to be an ideal interstate conveyor of enslaved people. Slave trading was big business, and merchant houses, insurance companies, and banking institutions all contributed to its maintenance. So, while readers have to wait more than one hundred pages to reach the actual revolt, they are better prepared to understand it. The Creole rebels might have been an aberration insofar as successful slave “mutinies” go, but the diplomacy of slavery and the interstate maritime slave were anything but aberrational; they sat at the heart of antebellum America. All of this contextual work lays the foundation for Kerr-Ritchie’s recounting of the rebellion and its massive reverberations. While much of the actual revolt is well known, Rebellious Passage offers the reader something important and new by placing people of color at the center of the postrevolt story, not just at the violent climax. The rebels who overtook the ship chose to head for British territory. Once reaching Bahamian waters, the formerly enslaved people decided to leave the vessel and seek protection from British authorities. The British West Indian regiment of black soldiers secured the vessel while diplomats debated the appropriate course of action. Everyday black Bahamians, many working on small watercraft, facilitated the enslaved people’s flight from the ship and forced the hand of the British state. Thus, while white officials at the time put themselves at the center of the Creole’s story of slavery and freedom, Kerr-Ritchie explains that their actions were always in response to people of color on the ground, on the waves, and on the ship itself. This is one of Rebellious Passage’s key contributions; the British state did not free the slaves of the Creole. Rather, [End Page 259] the self-emancipated allowed the British state, itself compelled by its black subjects, to protect the liberty they already held. Rebellious Passage, then, is self-consciously history from the “bottom upward” (xxv). The final four chapters move away from the Bahamas and are largely situated in diplomatic parlors and Louisiana courtrooms...