| Abstract |
"Christopher Blakley's Empire of Brutality is a human-animal history of slaving and slavery in the Atlantic World between the end of the seventeenth century and the abolition of the Atlantic trade in 1808. His multidisciplinary study examines how varied relationships between enslaved people and animals led to the dehumanization and racialization of people of African descent in the Americas. Blakley discusses the role of animal exchanges among slavers in West Africa, the knowledge and curiosity of enslaved specimen collectors in the Atlantic world, regimes of labor on Caribbean and Chesapeake plantations, and the forms of resistance that enslaved people engaged in by injuring, killing, stealing, and thinking about animals. His analysis provides a better understanding of why enslaved people emphasized in their writing how slaveholders compared them to animals, suggesting that critiques of slavery as dehumanizing by people of African descent were to a marked degree the result of these material human-animal networks and linkages. Blakley's study brings together disparate geographies-including the castle trade in Atlantic Africa, slave depots in New Spain, and plantations in the British Caribbean and Chesapeake worlds-to build on the emerging literature of human-animal studies and new scholarship in early American environmental history. His work is among the first to approach human-animal networks under slavery systematically and comprehensively. It makes a significant contribution by historicizing human-animal relations produced by Atlantic-wide networks of slavery. It also provides an analysis of these linkages that, over time, led to the racialization and dehumanization of people of African descent as animal-like subjects. In this way, his work offers an important environmental and material basis for the rich scholarship on the ideological and intellectual origins of race and racism. It also illuminates the divergent affective responses of enslaved people towards animals ranging from curiosity to disgust and empathy"-- Provided by publisher. |
