Book Notes

Hicks centers this narrative on the subaltern class of the South Atlantic slave trade: the "captive cosmopolitans" born in Africa and Brazil between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.These maritime agents helped shape culture and commerce in slave societies on land and on the Atlantic through their personal and group quests for social and economic advancement.Cosmopolitan African-and Brazilian-born mariners occupied an ambiguous role.On the one hand, slaveholders exploited "the minds as well as the bodies of the enslaved . . .for the forging of new financial instruments, the securing of commodified captives in Africa, and the forming of new cultures and communities in Bahia" (p. 4).On the other hand, driven by "compulsion and coercion," these same individuals acquired new "linguistic, cultural, and commercial fluencies" (p.375).While their skills were often deployed to achieve their personal freedom or that of their relatives and close associates, some sailors leveraged these fluencies to profit from the trade in captives.As a result, captive cosmopolitans developed a concept of freedom that diverged from "liberal notions of personal independence" (p.34).To trace the connections between Africa and Bahia, Brazil, during the final years of the trade in human beings, Hicks draws on ship papers, travel accounts, official reports and correspondence, and a wide range of legal texts, including lawsuits (particularly freedom suits), petitions, wills, and inventories.She reconstructs the material, cultural, and social conditions that gave form to diverse life stories between the coasts.Notably, Hicks emphasizes captive cosmopolitans' insights into commercial negotiations, healing practices, maritime geographies, and legal discourses advocating for personal liberty.Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery is an essential contribution to the scholarship on mobility under slave regimes and the intellectual contributions of enslaved, freed, and freeborn African-descended historical actors across slave societies in the South Atlantic world during the final decades of the slave trade.[