Book ID: CBB095146494

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (2018)

unapi

Bennett, Herman L. (Author)


University of Pennsylvania Press


Publication Date: 2018
Physical Details: 240
Language: English

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. (Publisher)

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Reviewed By

Review Alex Borucki (Winter 2019) Review of "African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic". Business History Review (pp. 827-829). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB095146494/

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Authors & Contributors
Beemen, Olivier van
Seiderer, Anna
Helena Mateus Jerónimo
Moses E. Ochonu
Amaeshi, Kenneth
Pereira, Hugo Silveira
Concepts
Business history
International relations
Slave trade
Colonialism
Power (social sciences)
International Business corporations
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
18th century
16th century
15th century
21st century
Places
Africa
Portugal
Spain
Latin America
Arabian Sea region
Bristol (England)
Institutions
Chance Brothers and Company
Compañía Mexicana de Aviación
Heineken’s Bierbrouwerij Maatschappij
Universidade do Porto
Royal Society of London
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