Part of review forum on “Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery”

Humans in Shackles is a massive, important study, covering more than five centuries of history that recognizes the central role that Brazil and West Central Africa played during the transatlantic slave trade. Ana Lucia Araujo covers the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, its operation and legacies, linking Nantes, Lisbon, Liverpool, Ouidah, Luanda, Saint-Louis, Charleston, Port-au-Prince, and Salvador. These cities tend to be studied separately or grouped by European empires. Rarely does a single volume give attention to all of them. Humans in Shackles does this, stressing similarities and examining the different roles slavery and enslaved individuals had in these locations. Araujo reminds readers that slavery and enslaved labor were at the center of empire making and capitalism consolidation. It is a book about the past while being deeply anchored in current debates, including those about memorialization and the afterlives of slavery in Brazil, the United States, Benin, and France. Araujo chooses to center individuals, particularly enslaved women, and not slave ships, or revolts, or powerful men. This is a powerful and carefully researched book that needs to be read, particularly in this current political moment.

Araujo is a skilled historian who meticulously analyzes written documents—including official correspondence, legislation, travel accounts, and newspaper articles—in Portuguese, French, and English. She also engages with novels, films, engravings, paintings, artifacts, monuments, and heritage sites as evidence to present a comprehensive account of the transatlantic slave trade. Humans in Shackles offers new research and synthesis of scholarship only available in French, Portuguese, and Spanish, which is usually ignored by Anglophones.

The book is divided into seventeen chapters plus an introduction and epilogue. Readers will appreciate Araujo’s ability to discuss and summarize dense debates, such as the nature of earlier encounters between Europeans and Western Africans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or the discussion on slave families, and slave rebellions and revolts. Chapter Two, “Catching People,” reconstructs the mechanisms of enslavement in the African continent, stressing the different violent processes that transformed free individuals into slaves. Araujo emphasizes historical variations between the seventeenth-century raids in West Central Africa, the role of warfare in eighteenth-century Dahomey, and the spread of kidnapping in the nineteenth-century Oyo Empire. The result, as Araujo shows, is that no one was safe, but individuals came from specific contexts and under different circumstances. Araujo’s careful engagement with the scholarship allows her to bring attention to West Central African societies, particularly Kikongo-, Kimbundu-, and Umbundu-speaking populations, and how their worldviews and knowledge influenced slave societies in Jamaica, Brazil, and Saint Domingue. She observes that individuals brought knowledge across the Atlantic with them that influenced burial practices, as discussed in Chapter Five, “Discarded Lives,” and ideas of marronage (Chapter Thirteen, “Resisting Bondage). Araujo stresses technology transfer, including farming, trading, and smelting. While discussing specific examples she makes important observations, including offering a new interpretation to the term quilombo (357–58).

Humans in Shackles compares slavery as an institution across time and space, connecting the failures of emancipation with new forms of forced labor and present-day debates about inequalities. It also shows that the transatlantic slave trade resulted in new classifications and political ideas of race that continue to shape policies and societies. Araujo historicizes enslavement, family separations, and forced displacements, making explicit connections between events in the African continent and the diaspora. In the process, she decenters the United States and the Anglophone world, reminding readers that any serious discussion about the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and their legacies needs to recognize that Brazil and West Central Africa societies played a central role. This is an important reminder considering that prominent scholars tend to ignore this simple fact in their studies, and do not engage with scholarship produced about these societies. (This list is quite extensive, but see among others David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986]; Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997]; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 [London: Verso, 1997]; James Walvin, The Slave Trade [New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011]; Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021]).

Araujo is a prolific historian who is committed to public history. She dialogues with projects such as 1619, as well as with more academic debates. In addition, she engages with memorialization of slavery in public spaces. Humans in Shackles is the latest of her long list of monographs, which includes, among others, influential titles such as The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), and Museums and Atlantic Slavery (Routledge, 2021). Scholars and nonspecialists have much to gain from Humans in Shackles. The work makes important contributions to African history as well as Atlantic and African diaspora scholarship, including on the (in)visibility of slavery legacies in public debate. Humans in Shackles establishes Araujo as one the leading scholars on Africa and the African diaspora.