HUMANS IN SHACKLES

A comprehensive survey of the Atlantic slave trade.

“Raised as a white person” in southern Brazil, Howard University professor Araujo is determined to include in her account both Latin America and those regions from which enslaved Africans were kidnapped. Synthesizing primary sources and other historians’ findings, she works her way from West Africa and West Central Africa, through the Middle Passage, to the Americas, then back again. As she contrasts the experiences of bondspeople across time and space, she takes care to explore the lives of enslaved women and to highlight enslaved people’s persistent efforts at resistance. Encouraging readers to understand suicide, infanticide, and celebration as expressions of resistance, Araujo argues that “bondspeople were protagonists of their own emancipation.” Araujo’s  writing can sometimes be dry, but this does not diminish the importance of her work. The facts alone are staggering; among them: “More than 4.8 million enslaved [people] landed on Brazilian shores…nearly ten times more than [in] the United States.” Seeing Nat Turner’s Rebellion of 1831 alongside Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica in 1760 and the Malê Revolt in Brazil in 1835 helps readers understand the scope of enslaved people’s armed resistance. Also astonishing is the range of sources from which Araujo and her colleagues glean information: In addition to slave narratives and oral tradition, she cites Inquisition records, enslaved people’s wills, and a particularly revealing 1684 Portuguese law regulating conditions on slave ships, among a wealth of other documents.

A sweeping and essential history of the slave trade.