Atlantic and Caribbean slaving

The edited volume Beyond 1619 represents a valuable contribution to a multi-imperial vision of Atlantic history, with an introductory chapter and nine essays covering the period from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. Most impressive is the range and diversity of the authors contributing archival and methodological insights to the volume. Experts on the French and English Atlantic, Blackness in New Spain, and Native enslavement in the Caribbean round out this polycentric approach to American enslavement. From the outset, the volume’s editors, Paul J. Polgar, Marc H. Lerner, and Jesse Cromwell, set out to demonstrate that the arrival of Angolan captives at Point Comfort in August 1619 was “a less singular event when placed on the far greater scale that is the Atlantic world” (1). To this end, part 1 develops around the theme of origins, with particular attention to Native enslavement and the origins of racial slavery in early Spanish, British, and French colonies. Part 2 centers on notions of mobility and the ways in which multidirectional displacements informed the systems of racial slavery from the Canaries to the Caribbean. Part 3, titled “Construction,” emphasizes the contingency and constant remaking of racial slavery in Barbados, Nova Scotia, and South Carolina.

While the debates surrounding the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project undoubtedly inform many of the essays in the volume, the editors do well in not dismissing the significance of that public debate. Instead, they propose a reorienting that dialogues with a much deeper and broader hemispheric process. In the editors’ words, “this volume maintains that spotlighting 1619 is valuable for how it signals that the colonies that would become the United States, like most other spaces in the Americas, were built in large part upon inconsistent classification systems that consigned certain populations to kidnapping, forced labor, torture, rape, and murder with impunity” (11). In so doing, the essays in the volume inform us about the decades before the Iberian Union (1580–1640) and well after, concluding with the settlement of the Black Loyalists in Sierra Leone during the early 1800s.

In chapter 2, Rebecca Anne Goetz offers an early examination of how Iberian forms of enslavement proliferated during the first three decades of the sixteenth century in the southern Caribbean. Scholars typically default to the New Laws of 1542 and the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas to explain how and why the Spanish Crown condemned Native slavery. Instead, Goetz analyzes the Real Provisión of 1530, which prohibited enslaving Indigenous people under any pretext. She demonstrates how the decree threatened the slave-trafficking, pearl-fishing, price-fixing, and tax-evading activities of men like Pedro Ortiz de Matienzo and Juan López de Archuleta on the islands of Cubagua and Margarita. When Empress Isabel proclaimed the decree, she effectively launched “a full-scale assault on the primary means of wealth building and power accumulation in the pearl fisheries and elsewhere” (40). Yet Goetz stresses the fragility of Real Provisión, which targeted colonizer power but lacked any mechanism to enforce it. In the southern Caribbean, López de Archuleta refused to publish the Provisión (as a local official), while his business partner Ortiz de Matienzo set sail for Spain to challenge it in person. By 1534, Emperor Charles V had formally withdrawn the slaving prohibition and accepted that to profit from the Spanish Caribbean “monarchs had to tolerate slaving and slavers’ challenges to their authority” (44). In summary, the chapter demonstrates how the trafficking of Native people operated in the years prior to the establishment of the mainland viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru.

In chapter 3, Brett Rushforth continues this thematic focus on Native enslavement and the eventual imposition of African slave-trading companies. His essay also focuses on the southern Caribbean, though with particular attention to the activities of Francophone colonists. Based on careful work in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Rushforth demonstrates that the planters of Martinique were willing to purchase the victims taken in mainland raids well into the late seventeenth century. For these French colonists, consistently securing the permanent labor of Native and Black captives far outweighed the exclusive commercial rights of the Compagnie du Sénégal et Côtes d’Afrique. This is an important intervention, as it indicates that French colonizers resorted to enslaving non-Europeans wherever they could acquire them. Only “concentrated investments in the transatlantic slave trade” would turn planters away from such methods as “African slave trading companies actively suppressed Native American slavery to protect their own financial interests” (46). In this sense, the author does well to note a hemispheric dependence on enslaved Amerindians in the 1680s and 1690s. Rushforth’s essay dialogues well with Andrés Reséndez’s The Other Slavery and Erin Woodruff Stone’s Captives of Conquest, studies that have recently recentered Native people in Spanish American slave regimes.Footnote ¹

In chapter 6, Casey Schmitt extends the volume’s focus on the seventeenth-century Caribbean through the experiences of enslaved people of African descent caught in the crossfire of transimperial warfare. Enslavement and the trafficking of human captives, she demonstrates, were integral to the military operations of English and Frenchmen. For instance, the devastating 1665 raid on Dutch St. Eustatius and Saba resulted in the capture of hundreds of enslaved people at the hands of English “privateers and soldiers of fortune” (109–110). Schmitt explains how the commanders of the English maritime force abandoned the geopolitical objective of invading Curaçao when pressured by their seamen to divide these human prizes. In other words, English raiders imposed the logistics of pillaging and raiding over strategic military goals. They would reenslave and sell five hundred of these captives in Jamaica, and over four hundred in English St. Christopher and Nevis. These were not isolated practices, as in 1666 the French raided English Antigua, Montserrat, and St. Christopher, capturing 1,700 enslaved people. Following the invasion, the captives “were distributed among the [French] officers and soldiers for pay for boot” (113). These incessant raids in the Lesser Antilles during the 1660s meant that an African captive could easily be displaced into another empire’s territories two or three times in the span of two or three years. This was undoubtedly the case of some of the anonymous victims trafficked from Curaçao to Dutch St. Eustatius, then to English St. Christopher, followed by yet another displacement into the Francophone Caribbean.

Finally, Chloe Ireton advances a fascinating case study on the complexity of slavery and freedom in the Spanish empire through “The Life and Legacy of Francisco Carreño.” On the basis of deep research in the Contratación records of the Archivo General de Indias, Ireton reconstructs the social networks of a free man of African descent from the Canary Islands who spent sixteen years of his life working on the Mexican mainland. Carreño distinguished himself as a highly skilled maestro de azúcar in sugar plantations in New Spain from the late 1580s to the early 1600s. He was also the freeborn son of a free Black Canarian mother and, in turn, made sure to protect the freedom of his own son, Juan. In this light, Ireton does well to highlight the strategizing behind Carreño’s 1603 testament as “the product of a specific intellectual milieu and personal cartography” (98). Carreño’s archival legibility as a mulato libre, master of sugar, and notarially savvy property owner produces a compelling counterpoint to the anonymity imposed on people of African descent in the English and French Caribbean. The paradox is that Carreño’s archival persona was also tied to his role as an enslaver of no fewer than five Black people, including an Angolan couple and their child. Ireton elegantly delineates these affective and spatial dimensions of Francisco Carreño’s relationships with Spanish officials, enslaved Black women, and the executors of his final will.

Another remarkable edited volume, Transatlantic Bondage: Slavery and Freedom in Spain, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico, provides a foundational understanding that explains how people of African descent (like Francisco Carreño) embedded themselves in the Spanish American empire. Through eight chapters spanning the years 1500 to 1800, the authors advance a productive analysis of specific restrictions and privileges that conditioned Black life in the Iberian Peninsula and the Spanish Caribbean. The first two chapters address the legal realm in Iberia, in which royal and municipal authorities issued decrees regulating the enslaved person’s access to alcohol, refuge, food, and water. The anxiety to control the bodily movements of enslaved people is analyzed well in Rocío Periánez Gómez’s study of Extremadura’s municipal ordinances. In the middle chapters of the volume, authors examine the relationship between Hispaniola’s first slave laws, the pursuit of freedom, and Black women’s foundational role in Santo Domingo. The last two chapters center on contraband, the smuggling of enslaved Africans and the formation of godparentage networks in Puerto Rico. What emerges most clearly from these studies is the possibility of advancing specific studies of personhood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries despite enslavement.

David Stark’s chapter on godparentage urges readers to consider why baptism held such importance for enslaved and free residents of San Juan, Puerto Rico, between 1672 and 1706. Drawing on extant baptismal records, the author uncovers a highly gendered phenomenon that was deeply tied to San Juan’s garrison. In a city in which women outnumbered men, one would expect godmothers (madrinas) to be highly visible in these parish records. Yet this was not the case. Of the “1,027 baptismal sponsors” studied in San Juan, “958 were male and 51 were female” (200). The parents of enslaved Puerto Ricans overwhelmingly preferred godfathers (padrinos) to sponsor their child’s entry into Catholicism, as men attached to the San Juan garrison were chosen at a high rate as religious sponsors. The soldier Juan Cortijo, for instance, took on the honor and responsibility of being a padrino to enslaved people on twelve occasions (201). This preference for military men produced godfathers who were asked to serve as sponsors time and again. During the years between 1672 and 1706, approximately 23 percent of these baptisms featured soldier-godfathers (206). Given the universality of baptismal recordkeeping in Spanish domains, Stark’s thought-provoking essay should invite comparative studies on baptism from other Caribbean ports with military garrisons.

In a very different approach to a Spanish Caribbean port city, Lissette Acosta Corniel’s “Black Women in Sixteenth-Century Santo Domingo” urges scholars to reconceptualize the early history of Hispaniola to center on women of African descent. Drawing on the records and local memories of Santo Domingo’s first hospital, the inventories of early sugar plantations on Hispaniola, municipal ordinances and judicial cases, the author demonstrates that Black women influenced the development of the colony from its very inception. The case of the Hospital San Nicolás is especially relevant, since its foundation (prior to 1502) was attributed to a free, “pious black woman who took in the free people she could and healed them as she could” in “a hut next to where today is the Chapel of the virgin of Altagracia” (148). The eventual naming of this institution for Governor Nicolás de Ovando (1502–1609) demonstrates how Black women’s tangible contributions to Santo Domingo were effaced. By 1518 other governors requested that the Spanish Crown send Black women in greater numbers to Hispaniola because marriage was understood to serve “as the axis of settlement” (138) and as a preemptive pacification of rebellious enslaved men. Yet, through a deep reading of the case of the free, single woman, María de Cota, the author illustrates how Black women’s experiences in Santo Domingo can also be interpreted through the lens of female social networks and considerable geographic mobility.

Los márgenes de la esclavitud, edited by Consuelo Naranjo Orovio and published by Editorial Dykinson in Madrid, brings together an introduction and fourteen chapters on slavery and emancipation in Spanish America. As a whole, the edited volume skews toward the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with considerable emphasis on Cuban and Puerto Rican case studies. There are a few notable exceptions to this generalization. First, Amadeo Julián offers a very interesting examination of eighteenth-century exclusionary Dominican practices in his chapter, “Discriminación racial contra negros y mulatos en Santo Domingo en la época colonial.” Drawing on a 1714 case from the Archivo General de Indias, Julián illustrates how the Santo Domingo cabildo attempted to impede Alonso Muñoz from claiming an accountant position due to his marriage to Marcela de Azebedo, a free parda woman. Paradoxically, the racist municipal elites reconstructed Azebedo’s genealogy to prove that she was born of “freed pardos from both paternal and maternal lines” (32). The cabildo members even identified Azebedo’s enslaved ancestors and the family’s belonging to the Cofradía de Nuestra Señora del Carmen (a brotherhood for people of African descent), in hopes that these associations would negatively impact Muñoz’s aspirations. They did not. In 1719, the Council of the Indies ruled that Alonso Muñoz would be named to the accountant position. Yet more than Muñoz’s legal victory, Julián illustrates how colonial Dominicans manipulated various archival registers to construct specific narratives of afrodescendiente personhood.

Similarly, José Luis Belmonte Postigo advances a deep examination of the intimate relationships between enslavers and their laborers through the 1740s records of the Archivo Regional La Libertad in Trujillo, Perú. A close reading of that notarial archive allows the author to reconstruct the capabilities of enslaved people to negotiate better everyday conditions. In so doing, the author also sheds light on the resources available to people immersed in the social networks between Lima and Guayaquil. In “Comparar para redimir,” Magdalena Candioti examines the remarkable writings of Adolfo Rawson and his quest to differentiate mid-nineteenth-century Argentina from the United States. In this fascinating intellectual history, Rawson emerges as a young, idealistic abolitionist who penned his Disertación filosófica sobre la esclavatura at the age of seventeen. Candioti analyzes Rawson’s writings in the context of early debates on human evolution, monogenism, and polygenism in 1860s Buenos Aires. Other chapters in the volume address the question of abolition, including Luis Miguel García Mora’s “Los límites de lo posible” and “Los masones españoles y el movimiento abolicionista en la época del patronato” by Valeria Aguiar Bobet and Manuel Paz Sánchez.

The only chapter in Los márgenes to examine a non-Spanish society is Fausto E. Carbone’s analysis of the 1661 Barbados Slave Code in “Desde las plantaciones de tabaco hasta las plantaciones de azúcar.” Here the author offers a useful synthesis of English-language studies on Barbadian history and cites well-known documents from the Public Record Office to explain the wider significance of the 1661 code. As scholars of the English Atlantic will attest, the Barbadian code would serve as the model for similar codes in Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia, and Jamaica. Carbone also incorporates lengthy block quotes from the Swiss physician Felix Christian Spoeri and from An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes. Unfortunately, these primary sources are not translated into Spanish, which is lamentable considering the volume’s intended readership.

Archives of personhood

In very different approaches to archival legibility and personhood, Jenny Shaw and Randy M. Browne have penned thought-provoking and complementary studies on the plantation societies of the English Caribbean. Shaw’s The Women of Rendezvous proposes a study of enslavement, archival legibility, and community formation. The book opens, in stunning fashion, with the baptismal entries of the nine children fathered by the planter John Peers on the island of Barbados. The names of all nine appear on a single day, August 13, 1683, in the records for the Christ Church Parish register (today held at the National Archives of Barbados). In a society that actively excluded enslaved people from Christian rites, the inclusion of six of the Peers children—those of African descent—is surprising. Because while three of the children were born to the English servant Dorothy Spendlove, the remaining six belonged to Susannah Mingo and Elizabeth Ashcroft, women of African descent enslaved to Peers. Over an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, Shaw charts the convoluted history of the children born to Elizabeth, Susannah, and Dorothy on the Rendezvous plantation and follows them across the Atlantic and into English society in the 1690s.

The opening chapters of the book allow the reader to understand the context of late seventeenth-century Barbados and the particularities of the Peers estate. Rendezvous was one of the most productive sugar plantations in the colony, evidence of the brutal labor extracted from enslaved Africans and their children. As a planter, John Peers acquired captive people from contraband slavers and Royal African Company vessels, such as the John Bonaventure that made port in Bridgetown after a 1680 slaving voyage “from the Gold Coast and Arda” (23). In these opening pages, both the horrors of these transatlantic displacements and the cycles of sugarcane cultivation are clearly explained. Chapter 2, “Household Intimacies,” moves away from the labor extracted in the fields to the pressures experienced in the Rendezvous plantation home. Shaw frames the interactions between John, Susannah, Elizabeth, and Dorothy through the lens of “coerced sex.” This framework allows the author to consider how even John’s wives, Hester and Frances, “had difficulty refusing his sexual demands” despite the fact “they were by no means in equal positions.” A sobering genealogical tree, titled “Lineage of the Women and Their Children,” features the names of the eighteen Peers children born to free English and enslaved African-descent women (48). In so doing, Shaw opens a generative discussion on what pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering might have looked like in the plantation residence.

The second half of the book follows the women and children of the Rendezvous plantation as they traveled with Peers from Barbados to England in 1686. On London’s docks, the children and their mothers encountered a variety of Black workers, who “had lived their whole lives in freedom; others had escaped bondage; or challenged their owners’ right to their lives and labor in the courts” (105). Slavery remained a tangible reality in late seventeenth-century England, as seen in early modern portraiture of enslaved people with metal collars padlocked around their necks. In chapter 5, “Courting Legitimacy,” the author turns to Dorothy, Susannah, and Elizabeth’s strategies after John Peers’s death in 1689. Whereas in the Caribbean setting the death of an enslaver could rupture the Black families bound to a sugar estate, the three women in question found themselves relatively established at the Streatham manor, just south of London. When John’s brother-in-law, Robert Chaplin, expelled Dorothy, Elizabeth, and their children from the residence, they promptly entered a lawsuit. This section is particularly impressive as Shaw brings into relief the lives of “creoles from the colonies, mothers of children society considered illegitimate” through painstaking research in the depositions and answers of the Chancery Court proceedings (140). Over the course of four years, they contested their rights to the deceased’s estate, which in turn implied resorting to lawyers. The women were deeply knowledgeable of the profits produced by the Rendezvous plantation, and as such, they demanded the continued payment of the annuities due to them and their children.

Perhaps the most remarkable element of The Women of Rendezvous is its meticulous tracing of Elizabeth, Susannah, and Dorothy’s movements and immersion in specific communities in England and Barbados. Susannah Mingo and her children, for instance, relocated to Spitalfields, where they would interact with recently arrived French Huguenots. Richard Mingo, Susannah’s son, joined the British Navy as a mariner and sailed throughout the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Caribbean in the early eighteenth century. Remarkably, he did so as a free man, despite the fact that he was born to an enslaved woman. Richard’s de facto freedom speaks to “the assumed free status” that his mother and Elizabeth Ashcroft managed to consolidate over the course of their many displacements (146). Shaw has crafted a compelling study of archival legibility, of how and when the lives of enslaved women and servants manifest in a fraught transatlantic archive. The book offers a remarkable exercise in the study of exceptional circumstances and unusual people: the African-descent children formally baptized in a Barbadian plantation, the enslaver who left annuities to his enslaved concubines, and the mixed-race descendants who melded into the fabric of eighteenth-century English society.

If Shaw recovered the intimacies of women in the plantation residence, Browne’s The Driver’s Story reveals the world of the Black men who controlled the labor and power dynamics of the fields. The book centers on the social and cultural world of enslaved overseers in Berbice, Demerara-Essequibo, Trinidad, and St. Lucia, territories acquired by the British in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A trove of rich cases on drivers’ motivations, constraints, and personal interactions comes to light as these societies adapted to “the appointment of legal officials known as fiscals and protectors of slaves” (3). In this respect, Browne binds the history of less-studied societies to the deeper historiographies of Jamaica and Barbados. The result is a multisited monograph that uncovers how drivers balanced their families’ immediate concerns, the needs of hundreds of enslaved people, and the demands of exploitative plantation owners and managers. (For readers more familiar with the Spanish Caribbean context, the driver is more often known as the contramayoral.) Throughout the book’s five chapters, Browne argues that these pressures produced drivers and plantation societies in which “enslaved people did not share a common political vision” (8). Because drivers were forced to negotiate coerced labor, ethnic differences, complex personal interactions, and the simmering threat of rebellion, the author contends that, in the end, “the balance of power tilted toward enslavers” (142).

Browne is to be commended for clearly articulating the promise and limitations of his archival approach in a “Sources and Methods” section, positioned between the introduction and first chapter. For instance, he is transparent in acknowledging that a study of overseers could reify an overwhelmingly masculine source base. At times, Browne expands the definition of what a driver did to account for women who were charged with supervising “children’s gangs” and who “also sometimes supervised adult field laborers” (11). The latter cases, unfortunately, are not well documented in the early nineteenth-century archive. Women more frequently appear in their relationships to drivers as wives, at times in polygynous kinship systems. In this reader’s perspective, the book’s most significant archival innovation lies in the careful use of the first-person complaints that entered the British Colonial Office. These documents allow Browne to sift through the specific worldview and memories of individual drivers, as was the case of Alexander, who was responsible for the Bath cotton plantation in the early 1810s.

Because enslaved overseers were conspicuous protagonists in Caribbean and mainland plantation societies, The Driver’s Story questions the historiographic tendency to overlook their influence on everyday life. Chapter 1, “The Driving System,” lays out the defining characteristics of overseers, their life expectancy, work regime, and the material advantages of their position. Drivers “lived longer than enslaved men in any other occupational category” and benefited from the footwear and clothing so often denied to field laborers (26). Browne draws on Richard Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations and Barry Higman’s Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, among other studies, to highlight the regional relevance of drivers.Footnote ² On this note, one may have expected more engagement with the historiography of nineteenth-century Cuba and Brazil. Chapter 2, “Driving,” addresses the question of insubordination and how drivers asserted their authority against fellow enslaved people. This chapter highlights the tenuous trust that developed between drivers, plantation owners, and managers. White authorities understood physical resistance and insubordination against drivers as “proxy attacks on their own authority with the potential to escalate into larger, more dangerous acts of resistance” (55). In the second section of the chapter, Browne turns to the ways in which drivers avoided such scenarios by negotiating private agreements with field workers. These also included not flogging enslaved people to the degree or severity that a manager demanded.

Chapter 3, “Big Men,” examines how drivers navigated marriage, kinship, and leadership expectations in Berbice, Jamaica, and Trinidad. Scholars interested in African social and political systems will be especially intrigued by Browne’s approach to several cases of polygyny. For instance, “in Berbice, a forty-six-year-old, African-born head-driver, Alexander, had eight children with his wife, Juno, six children with Nelly, and several grandchildren” (79). Such drivers held expansive social networks that the author understands as evidence of African notions of wealth-in-people. Browne persuasively highlights other cases from Berbice and St. Vincent to suggest that enslavers and managers tolerated such polygamous arrangements for their enslaved overseers. Scholars of Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean would do well to consider whether similar kinship structures emerged among enslaved people in nominally Catholic colonies.

The book’s last two chapters, “Unbounded Authority” and “Rebellion,” invite reflection on how drivers responded to moments of crisis. In the former, Browne explains how once-trusted overseers could be demoted for sabotaging production, excessive drinking, and simple negligence. The conflict between the driver January and Mr. Boas, the manager of a Berbice River coffee plantation, serves as a textured case study to examine questions of authority, positionality, and dependence. In this reader’s opinion, “Rebellion” offers the most compelling examination of the driver’s impossible position. Through a deep reading of the failed 1813–1814 Berbice rebellion, the author charts how some drivers plotted a colony-wide rebellion, while others conducted surveillance and reported on the rebels’ logistics. The recruitment of leaders from various African “nations,” including Congos, Coromantees, and the Chambas of the Bight of Benin, indicates that drivers could mobilize field hands along ethnic lines well beyond their own plantations. Ultimately, Browne finds that in Berbice “most drivers, most of the time, were not rebels,” as their personal desires ran against the motivations of the enslaved majorities (131). In summary, The Driver’s Story offers a nuanced view into the world of enslaved rural men as they navigated the power dynamics of Britain’s Caribbean and South American colonies in the seismic years that followed the Haitian Revolution. In advanced undergraduate or graduate coursework on Caribbean history, the monograph would align well alongside a deep corpus of nineteenth-century Cuban studies on Black resistance and rebellion.Footnote ³

South Atlantic connections and memories

Ana Lucia Araujo’s Humans in Shackles offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Atlantic slavery from the 1440s to the 1890s through the lens of a leading Brazilian scholar. In moving away from “national histories of slavery in the United States,” she articulates the need for a transimperial cultural approach that engages the experiences of enslaved women and the scholarship produced by scholars of Africa and Brazil (9). Throughout an introduction, seventeen short chapters, and an epilogue, Araujo argues that the sheer scale of the transatlantic slave trade in the South Atlantic requires much greater attention to Brazilian slaving interactions with Luanda, Benguela, and the Bight of Benin. However, she is careful to not lose sight of deep histories of enslavement and resistance in the French Caribbean, English Jamaica, Barbados, and the thirteen colonies. The experiences of Africans and their descendants in the Spanish Caribbean and mainland are represented through secondary references to Cartagena de Indias, Mexico City, Lima, Puebla, and Buenos Aires. Given the weight of slavery in Cuban history, special attention is given to the coffee and sugar plantations surrounding Havana and Matanzas.

In this reader’s opinion, this accessible general history is especially intended for readers familiar with US history, but curious to understand the broader dimensions of Atlantic slavery. In each chapter the lives of enslaved people in Charleston, New York City, New Orleans, and the Virginia colony are intentionally placed in dialogue with their counterparts elsewhere. For instance, chapter 6, “Markets of Human Flesh,” analyzes the varied spaces in which Africans and their descendants were dehumanized for sale. Here the author draws from Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and then pivots to the slave depots of Cartagena de Indias and the auction rooms of Rio de Janeiro’s Valongo. This approach effectively demonstrates a shared experience of displacement and despair. “The Weeping Time,” whether filtered through English-language biographies or Portuguese Jesuit correspondence, becomes a common bridge in this Atlantic history of enslavement (151).

Araujo’s readers will find numerous references to the Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua and better-known texts like Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life interspersed throughout the book. Given their publication in the abolitionist context, these texts orient the reader toward the nineteenth century and humanize the pain and resilience of the enslaved person. Baquaqua’s memoir is effectively used to connect the life and motivation of an enslaved African man to the historical development of nineteenth-century Brazil and the United States. Araujo is also to be commended for incorporating archival documents from Lusophone and Francophone repositories. Few monographs, let alone general histories, can place the Archives Municipales de la Rochelle in conversation with the Arquivo Publico de Rio Grande do Sul. Scholars and graduate students will especially appreciate the index, a full bibliography, and over ninety pages of detailed endnotes.

Marc Hertzman’s After Palmares: Diaspora, Inheritance, and the Afterlives of Zumbi offers a remarkable examination of how colonial Brazil’s most famed and feared maroon society was imagined, described and discussed in the seventeenth century and long thereafter. The book is structured into five thematic sections, “War & Conquest,” “Spirits,” “People,” “Places,” and “Deaths & Rebirths,” which in all contain eleven chapters. The monograph does a phenomenal job of placing Brazil’s deep historiography in dialogue with scholars of African linguistics, religion, history, and art history. This engagement is made clear in a fifty-three-page bibliographic section featuring hundreds of Portuguese- and English-language studies. The book does not follow a linear chronology, although readers interested in the timeline of Palmares’s extensive military conflicts and the dispersal of its residents in the late 1690s and early 1700s could read chapter 2 and chapter 5 for reference.

Rather than reduce Zumbi and his leadership of Palmares to their demise in 1695, Hertzman asks us to consider the confounding ways the memory of Brazilian maroon communities entered the historical record. In an innovative examination of how soldiers improved their reputation and standing with the Portuguese Crown, the author analyzes the numerous false deaths of Zumbi. Men like Manuel Lopes, João de Fonseca, and Domingos Rodrigues Carneiro had no issue repeatedly asserting their role in Zumbi’s death between 1676 and 1694. Where perhaps other scholars would dismiss such archival fabrications as curious minutiae, Hertzman contends that these claims “generate[d] wealth, power, and prestige for descendants of the soldiers and officers who fought against Palmares, especially those of African descent” (66). In other words, these false narratives (like the alleged suicide of the maroon leader) are essential materials that must be analyzed if one is to understand why Zumbi cast such a long shadow in colonial Brazilian society.

Chapter 4—“Flying Home?”—should be assigned in undergraduate and graduate African diaspora coursework for years to come. Here Hertzman analyzes the Inquisition cadernos of Pernambuco to provide fleeting “glimpses into some of the religious beliefs that Palmaristas likely held” (112). In particular, the subsection “Zumbi and Saint Benedict” invites readers of the Black experience in Latin America to consider how overlapping belief systems emerge in the archival record. The cult of the Black holy man, San Benito de Palermo, had been extensive in Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and Brazil since the early seventeenth century, as Erin Rowe and Rafael Castañeda García have demonstrated in recent studies.Footnote ⁴ Yet in the analysis of a fascinating 1756 case from Minas Gerais, Hertzman demonstrates that there was also slippage between “a saint called Sam Benidy” and “a Zumby, which in the language of Angola is a Saint” (121). In all these iterations, the devotees requested from Zumbi/San Benito permission to eat, but not before offering its physical representation food and tobacco first. Through such a thought-provoking case study, Hertzman offers a new entry point to the study of the African diaspora in Brazil, Angola, and beyond.