Poisoned Relations begins with what on first thought would seem to be an obvious premise: “People of both European and African descent conducted investigations to get to the bottom of what they saw as dangerous ‘poisoning’ events and the ‘poisoners’ in their midst, but the two groups held different ideas on what these terms meant” (1). The fact that this starting point should appear obvious overlooks the ways in which we often forget to recognize and seriously interrogate the underlying logics within the historical and cultural formations that determine language. As Berry makes clear, this oversite can be especially vexing when thinking of the process of translation that accompanied the colonial encounters that would later lay the foundations for the future legibility, or lack thereof, of racialized bodies, and more specifically enslaved Africans and their New World descendants.

In this book, Berry seeks to make explicit the “danger in uncritically imposing a singular definition of ‘poison’ onto the past without thinking through what it meant to whom and when and what they did about it” (1). The overall intention of the text is to explore “the ‘capacious’ category of poison in the Atlantic world…from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century” (1). The central question informing this investigation zeros in on “how the different actors involved in poisoning cases – enslavers and the enslaved; practitioners and clients; accused, accusers, witnesses, and judges – perceived and understood these ‘poisoning’ events” (1). Berry examines more than 500 cases of poisoning accusations across a 170-year span within the colonial geographies of Virginia, Bahia, Martinique, and the Dutch Guianas, including the territories that later became the British Guianas. Through this extensive analysis, the author provides an in-depth history of the relationship between ideas of “poison” and the people who wielded or feared it, within what Berry defines as the “contested Atlantic world” (2). Berry focuses on poisoning accusations as events, rather than poisonings themselves, and frames these events as opportunities to examine contested ideas about health, healing, and power. The author employs a nuanced and sophisticated historical and anthropological lens, treating events not merely as isolated happenings, but as interconnected sets of historical relations. By interrogating the broader dynamics surrounding colonial poisoning accusations, rather than the accusations alone, Berry challenges us to interpret these colonial encounters differently, drawing attention to historical silences that often remain overlooked.

The central tension of the book lies in the differing cultural and social frameworks through which Africans and Europeans understood poisoning. Berry explains that “Europeans discussed poison as a gendered ‘weapon of the weak’ through the lens of demonology, while Africans viewed it as an abuse of power by the powerful, framed through political morality” (3). This tension allows Berry to trace how European perceptions of poison evolved into a racialized concept within colonial power dynamics, used to justify enslaved people’s strategies for exerting power—over themselves, Europeans, and other enslaved Africans. Poison thus becomes a powerful lens for understanding the persistent anxieties Europeans harbored about the institution of slavery as a whole.

With regard to methodology, Berry explains that the “methods of historians of Africa can assist with the challenge of developing a comparable archive on the history of ideas between Europe and Africa, despite significant differences in their source bases” (4). According to the author, this method defined as “comparative linguistics” makes it possible to build such a history of ideas for West Central Africa. She combines historical methods with ethnographic data from early modern sources and a detailed social historical analysis, which gives place to “deep-scale histories of ideas.” This approach allows her to convincingly demonstrate that poison is not only a practice, but also a conceptual framework. Berry’s method allows for a meticulous tracing of the development of the words and concepts that have led to our modern understanding of poison in both African and European languages, pointing to the root words and the transformation of these words within historical contexts throughout a period of almost two centuries. A key offering of the text is the demonstration of the later collision between science and racial logics, as poison as an idea eventually becomes perceived through the lens of superstition and is related to both colonial Europeans and Africans. However, the ways that this tension would again fall into equilibrium as racial logics slip into the scientific method in a later historical period is beyond the scope of the text.

Overall, this book is accessible to both academics and general readers, offering a valuable contribution to the study of colonial African and European relations in the Americas. It also explores the historical and cultural determinants of language, as well as the lasting postcolonial impacts of these colonial dynamics in the contemporary world.