Part of review forum on “The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa”

It’s beautiful to have the opportunity to respond to these generous commentaries on The Heretic of Cacheu. At a time when many people are struggling in countless ways, I express my dearest thanks to my colleagues for drawing on their reserves of energy to address the book so thoughtfully, following the roundtable organized by Ana Lúcia Araujo and in which we all participated at ASA in Atlanta-2025.

A striking factor there was that both Hassoum Ceesay and Mariana Candido picked out the same quotation from the book—one which Ceesay reiterates here: my observation that “it is impossible to consider the complex histories of the African past without grasping the centrality of spiritual approaches to life, and what this may have meant to the core actors in the historical past.” This encapsulates the book’s core approach, which—as all the reviewers note—centers on the discussion of how this microhistory illuminates the epistemological struggle between West African and imperial European worldviews, and also—as Thiago Mota puts it—how to construct a narrative which is not a “retreat from structural analysis, but a demonstration of how structure emerges through lived experience.”

It’s nice to begin, then, by focusing on what the reviews have in common. Beyond epistemologies, they focus on questions of agency, economic change, gendered dimensions of Atlantic African history, and the book’s place in understanding the transatlantic slave traffic. They note how the book showcases the centrality of Western Africa in the process of globalization in the seventeenth century; and also the significance of a book working on this earlier period, where much historical work on both women’s history and biographical approaches to the African Atlantic focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There’s also the question of the place of class in all this, as Walter Hawthorne emphasizes.

Another core point of discussion relates to the ethics of historical writing. This is something about which we all think daily at this catastrophic moment: on the one hand, facing the emergence of reactionary identitarian politics worldwide; on a second hand, confronting the massive increase in impoverishment and socioeconomic despair; and on a “third hand,” experiencing the assault on the humanities, both from governments divesting from “economically unproductive” work, and from the march to power of artificial intelligence.

This is, as Candido notes, a time when history as a discipline is under attack. As all reviewers suggest in different ways, The Heretic of Cacheu speaks to these crisis-driven anxieties, while also raising questions as well as offering answers. For Hawthorne, the book’s microhistorical approach is twin-edged; Hawthorne is wary of my critiques of the datafication of history, when data also helps us to generate different understandings of the impacts of the transatlantic traffic, through the question of Walter Rodney’s class-driven analysis and also through the relative decline in intensity of this traffic in the era when the book is set. For Ceesay, it is difficult to square the recovery of Crispina Peres’s history with the fact that the materials I use to do this come from her torture at the hands of an imperial Portuguese institution, the Inquisition. For Mota, the use of the category of “heretic,” which Peres rejected, underscores many of the categorial and ethical difficulties facing historians today.

All these questions matter. How can we reconcile the practice of trying to do justice to the historical past with the pain which historical subjects like Crispina Peres experienced (and in turn, caused) as documented in the sources we use? How can we balance the opportunities and vastly increased knowledge (and access to knowledge) provided by the digital revolution, with the devastating challenges this revolution poses to questions of economic equity, and the objectification as data of historical subjects? How can we use meaningful historical categories for contemporary audiences, which historical subjects would themselves reject?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. I don’t think any of us do. But we can only address them by having open discussions like this, held as far as possible without judgment and in the awareness of how difficult these conversations must be—and also that it is absolutely urgent to have them.

So I am pleased that the book has allowed this kind of discussion. I believe this in part comes from its microhistorical methodology. Rather than looking at broad patterns, as the reviewers note, the microhistory permits a deeper engagement with present problems as well as those of the past. This is because, as Candido says, this approach allows a fuller engagement with globalization, power, and cultural exchange—through these themes, so many different aspects of a place emerge that the way in which these are constructed today must be discussed.

There can be little of more importance to the work of us all today.