Why read Reckoning with Slavery?

Book cover of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Book description

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…

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American history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Reckoning with Slavery as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Carla Gardina Pestana

Author

Jennifer Morgan’s brilliant new book, Reckoning with Slavery, explains the creation of racial slavery: how people were turned into commodities, not simply by selling their bodies and their labor but by redefining their most intimate relationships out of legal existence.

By denying kin relations, European enslavers—she focuses on the English—erected a gendered system of exploitation. She connects the rise of capitalism and the new propensity to count things and people to the changes that made slavery possible in the form it took in the Atlantic.

Morgan also reads little bits of information carefully, showing the reader their significance—her writing…

From Carla's 3 favorite reads in 2023.