Historicizing the “Beast-Man”

This essay surveys the emergence and trajectory of the historiography of slavery as it has at times intersected with human-animal studies. First, the essay traces the historiography of slavery from 1918 to the 1980s to question how historians wrote about both chattel slavery as a regime of labor involving animals and the dehumanizing function of slavery as an economic system. Second, the essay looks at how the “animal turn,” beginning in the 1980s, has since influenced how social, intellectual, and environmental historians have written about slavery and human-animal relationships. Finally, the essay concludes by making the case that animal historians interested in slavery should pay attention to ongoing debates and discussions in Black studies involving the philosophy of humanity.