African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic

by Herman L. Bennett

A thought-provoking reappraisal of the first European encounters with Africa

As early as 1441, and well before other European countries encountered Africa, small Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels were plying the coast of West Africa, where they conducted business with African kingdoms that possessed significant territory and power. In the process, Iberians developed an understanding of Africa's political landscape in which they recognized specific sovereigns, plotted the extent and nature of their polities, and grouped subjects according to their ruler.

In African Kings and Black Slaves , Herman L. Bennett mines the historical archives of Europe and Africa to reinterpret the first century of sustained African-European interaction. These encounters were not simple economic transactions. Rather, according to Bennett, they involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and politics. Bennett unearths the ways in which Africa's kings required Iberian traders to participate in elaborate diplomatic rituals, establish treaties, and negotiate trade practices with autonomous territories. And he shows how Iberians based their interpretations of African sovereignty on medieval European political precepts grounded in Roman civil and canon law. In the eyes of Iberians, the extent to which Africa's polities conformed to these norms played a significant role in determining who was, and who was not, a sovereign people—a judgment that shaped who could legitimately be enslaved.

Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as being solely mediated through the slave trade and racial difference. By asking in what manner did Europeans and Africans configure sovereignty, polities, and subject status, Bennett offers a new depiction of the diasporic identities that had implications for slaves' experiences in the Americas.

Genres: History, Africa, Nonfiction, Politics, World History

240 pages, Paperback

Published March 6, 2020

About the author

Herman L. Bennett is Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is author of Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico and Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640.

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

In contrast to Sheffer's book that I also finished today, I did not at all enjoy the prose of this book. His inability to write lucidly and create effective topic sentences seriously hampered his ability to convey his argument. Also, in a fairly short book, he wasted a fair amount of space by repeating multiple times per chapter not what HIS book does, but what previous studies didn't do.

[Leyla Schedrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent work with profound interventions in the field of Black Atlantic history and Diaspora studies. This feels like a work which will ripple through future scholarship. Four stars only because, while I liked the 'unravelling -- rebuilding' structure of the text, I hoped for a slight chapter rearrangement and stronger editing to tone down the repetition/language. It was beautiful and dense. Overall, I think this should be an essential read.

[Jess Carr · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent shift from “postcolonial theory” to “after postcoloniality.” What did Iberian Empire disrupt? African States. Why were Iberian enslavers who purchased “slaves” (read: humans kidnapped and decontextualized from their previous lives by some, such as in Guinea) eager to accept Guinean kidnappers’ narratives about those they enslaved? It absolved Iberians from needing to treat those Iberian Catholics then dislocated and continued to enslave according to the narrative and ethics that Iberian Catholicism required. Labeling those enslaved as “slaves” prevented Iberian enslavers from having to consider those they enslaved as Christian either before or after (by conversion or simple reevaluation) the moment of their “purchase,” relegating them to an utterly new slave status that transformed how it was possible for Iberians - who included many Judeoconversos, though it is beyond the scope of this book - to discuss not only those they had enslaved but an entire continent. Our historiography has not yet tangled with this level of dehumanization. Narratives of slavery have, at best, sometimes sought to argue for the humanity of slaves as an idea to be contended with at the conclusion of a book rather than taking it to be the premise and point of entry for any study. Bennett works his way through well-trod studies to catch our attention and redirect it further back in time, to the pre-colonial, which is how far back we would have to go to see Africans as humans in any historical or Enlightenment discourse. Humanity is not a status that we confer. And if we return to the pre-colonial, we see the humanity of all involved in, let’s say, the proto-colonial. We see, for example, some Guinean kidnappers and enslavers, yes, but we also see the humanity of those they enslaved, and the ways that Iberians treated Guinean enslavers as *royalty*, those enslaved as low-status *humans* to some extent, the liberal (which is not to say equitable or abolitionist) position of the church toward enslavement, as well as the uses and abuses that Iberians made when alternative systems for viewing slavery fell into their hands that seemed far more profitable than what had regulated their actions and maybe their souls in Iberian Catholicism.

[Andrew Clay Pauley]

I read enough to know that this is a very important book, but it's also extremely dense and verbose... I think that comes with the territory of a postcolonial history and historiography of the slave trade and European colonialism in Africa; however, despite the density, I learned a lot from what I did read... I think I had a chapter or two to go... I plan to return to it, but the dense prose did put me off. That will not factor into my eventual review, though. It's an important book that deserves to have its argument studied on its own terms.

[Daniel Polansky]

An argument for a revisionist view of early Atlantic slavery which better takes into account the complexities of political relations between the early Portuguese and Spanish slave-traders and the lords and chieftains of Africa's eastern seaboard.

[Jason S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very focused on historiography and philosophy of early encounters between Iberia and West Africa. Argues persuasively that political focus and not just trade was a key part of those interactions. Chapter on “history” with a focus on sovereignty was compelling…rest was too theoretical.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, brilliant intervention in the historiography and scholarship around the African diaspora and Atlantic slavery trade.

[Jennevieve Culver]

hated this shit

[Kelly McLoughlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lot of good stuff in here but largely inaccessible and I hate that

[Mark Steininger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense but excellent. I felt this was a critical reading particularly after reading Thornton's Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World. While I found myself taking a lot of notes and consulting other sources while reading this book, it examines an extremely revealing period in nascent modernity. The arguments about Catholicism, the Slave Trade and Africans being inseparable from the formation of Western modernity and the primacy of politics in the period felt the most compelling to me. I hope to read more of Bennett's work in the future, but advise only reading this book if you have some knowledge of Atlantic Historiography and are looking for a challenge.