Duke University Press Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

In Reckoning with Slavery Jennifer L. Morgan draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic. From capture to transport to sale to childbirth, these women were demographically counted as commodities during the Middle Passage, vulnerable to rape, separated from their kin at slave markets, and subject to laws that enslaved their children upon birth. In this way, they were central to the binding of reproductive labor with kinship, racial hierarchy, and the economics of slavery. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Morgan demonstrates that the development of Western notions of value and race occurred simultaneously. In so doing, she illustrates how racial capitalism denied the enslaved their kinship and affective ties while simultaneously relying on kinship to reproduce and enforce slavery through enslaved female bodies. Review "Jennifer L. Morgan examines the transition to racialized slavery in the early modern Atlantic world with innovative research methods and original analysis. She brilliantly accounts for the emergence of an unholy alliance between a novel proficiency with numbers and the hierarchical classification of human difference, which helped to make kinship into a commodity. This is essential reading for anyone who wonders how Black humanity ceased to matter to some, and why centuries later we must still proclaim the worth of Black lives."--Vincent Brown, author of "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War" "Jennifer L. Morgan makes an original, innovative, and creative intervention in the study of race and gender that establishes the groundwork necessary for revising our knowledge of the systems of trade and the commodification of peoples in the nineteenth century. Reckoning with Slavery is essential reading for anyone in the social sciences and the humanities who wants to understand the formation of the modern world. A major work."--Hazel V. Carby, author of "Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands" About the Author Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, author of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, and coeditor of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in America.