WINNER
Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance(Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Nikki M. Taylor makes an important contribution to the literature on slavery and resistance by showing that if up to this day, there is little evidence about the active participation of enslaved women in slave revolts in the United States, bondswomen were active participants in individual acts of violent daily resistance, even when they were putting their life at risk. The book draws on several cases of enslaved women who resisted the institution of slavery by killing their owners in colonial North America and the antebellum US South. Combining meticulous research and captivating storytelling, Taylor illuminates overlooked forms of slave resistance led by bondswomen. Each chapter examines the case of one or more enslaved women who after years of facing abuse at the hands of their owners, decided to take their destiny into their own hands by killing their slavers through a variety of methods including arson and poisoning. Exploring the motivations that led these bondswomen to choose lethal forms of resistance against their owners, Taylor develops the notion of personal justice as the only form of justice available for these women who were doomed to be abused. By doing so, Taylor’s Brooding Over Bloody Revenge makes an important contribution to the literature on slavery and resistance by showing that if up to this day, there is little evidence about the active participation of enslaved women in slave revolts in the United States, bondswomen were active participants in individual acts of violent daily resistance, even when they were putting their life at risk. Brooding over Bloody Revenge is beautifully written, deeply researched, and powerfully argued. Focusing on the United States, the book also informs the fight of enslaved women in other parts of the Americas. Built on academic research of high caliber the book is also accessible to all readers, a quality that embodies one of the central dimensions of the #slaveryarchive mission.
Finalists
Emancipatory Narratives and Enslaved Motherhood: Bahia, Brazil, 1830-1888 (Liverpool University Press, 2023) by historian Jane-Marie Collins is a profound contribution to the English-language literature on motherhood in the age of slavery. While this literature has grown in the last two decades, it has mainly focused on motherhood in the slave-holding British colonies of the Caribbean and North America in today’s United States. Collins’s meticulously researched book broadens this literature by bringing into it cases from the Brazilian context. She takes advantage of the vast archive of freedom suits in nineteenth-century Salvador, Bahia, employing this “fragmentary and often disparate record of the knotty ‘emancipatory desires’ of African women and their descendants” to reconstruct how enslaved mothers pursued freedom for themselves and their progeny. Collins thus also adds to the growing literature of how the enslaved pursued their own freedom through various avenues in nineteenth-century Latin America. Methodologically innovative, Collins tells the compelling stories of Black mothers seeking freedom to better care for their offspring and break the old chains of partus sequitur ventrem.
Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
(Yale University Press, 2023) by historian Nicholas Radburn is an exceptionally researched book that reveals previously unexplored aspects of the British slave trade, by offering significant insights for both scholars and general readers. Based on a large array of archival sources, the book expands on previous studies of the British slave trade by examining both the early and late stages of the Atlantic slave trade. Rayburn carefully examines the mechanisms of the trade on the African coast until the final phase when enslaved Africans were sold in the Americas. Radburn argues that the dramatic expansion of the British slave trade in the eighteenth century was driven by merchants who developed increasingly efficient methods. These new strategies allowed them to reduce their time on the African coasts while acquiring large numbers of captives. The book also highlights how British traders and planters used factors such as gender, age, and health to make decisions about how to transport enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean and which kind of labor activities they were assigned in the Americas.
Committee members prize 2023:
Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University)
Miguel Valerio (University of Washington in St-Louis)
Vanessa Holder (University of Kentucky)
Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University)