In The Logic of Slavery, Tim Armstrong ambitiously links the metaphor of slavery to a series of other metaphors—those of debt, technology, sculpture, sound, and even weather. It is a slippery endeavor, precisely because slavery is both ubiquitous yet concealed in the language of art, law, politics—indeed, in everyday life. Moreover, any tropology of slavery risks diminishing the unique horror of the institution, a fear voiced by Frederick Douglass in a speech to his English supporters in 1846: “I think the term slavery is sometimes abused by identifying it with that which it is not.” To his credit, Armstrong is careful not to trivialize the institution and argues, quite convincingly in my mind, that “slavery itself is necessarily metaphorical: no human being is in any direct or literal sense an instrument of another or a commodity.” Armstrong divides his argument into three sections, the first centered around the metaphor of slavery as debt as revealed through the history of maritime insurance, property rights, and even African American narrative technique; the second centered around the metaphor of technology (“the instrumentalization of the body of the slave”) as revealed through the discourse of industrialization and history of nineteenth-century sculpture; and finally, a section on slavery as suppressed pain, as released sonically through African American music and through tropes of weather in African American literature.

The astonishing chronological, methodological, and topical breadth of Armstrong’s study is both its greatest strength and weakness. In certain chapters, he remains firmly grounded in the nineteenth century; in others he begins in antiquity and ends in the twentieth century. He switches easily from the historical to the narratological and from the worlds of commerce and law to art and literature. In the process, the reader may experience both delight and disorientation. As Armstrong admits in his introduction, the book began as a theory of technology and slavery, on the one hand, and a history of shipwreck and risk in the Atlantic world, on the other. It was only later that he added sections on slavery tropes in sculpture, music, trauma, and debt, housing them under the titular rubric, “The Logic of Slavery.” That logic, however, can sometimes become muddled, as when Armstrong jumps from the “sonic veil” in chapter five (a figure he uses to describe how slavery resonates in literature and sound technology) to an alternate theory of trauma based on the trope of the weather rather than the wound, in chapter six. Nonetheless, The Logic of Slavery is a bracing read and a showcase for Armstrong’s remarkable intellectual flexibility and range.