Community-initiated genomics

Ancient DNA is used to connect enslaved African Americans to modern descendants.

Ship fever, confinement, and the racialization of disease

This paper presents the case of ship fever as a disease whose colonial origins and description by English-speaking physicians contributed to the racialization of European and African bodies in the second half of the eighteenth century. Historicizing ship fever as a disease associated with the health of sympathetic White soldiers and sailors, and notions that enslaved Africans were less vulnerable to a disease caused by confinement, contributes to ongoing analyses of the intersection of medicine, race, and slavery in the British Atlantic world after the Seven Years' War.

Skin color and race

Skin color is the primary physical criterion by which people have been classified into groups in the Western scientific tradition. From the earliest classifications of Linnaeus, skin color labels were not neutral descriptors, but connoted meanings that influenced the perceptions of described groups. In this article, the history of the use of skin color is reviewed to show how the imprint of history in connection with a single trait influenced subsequent thinking about human diversity. Skin color was the keystone trait to which other physical, behavioral, and culture characteristics were linked. To most naturalists and philosophers of the European Enlightenment, skin color was influenced by the external environment and expressed an inner state of being. It was both the effect and the cause. Early investigations of skin color and human diversity focused on understanding the central polarity between "white" Europeans and nonwhite others, with most attention devoted to explaining the origin and meaning of the blackness of Africans. Consistently negative associations with black and darkness influenced philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant to consider Africans as less than fully human and lacking in personal agency. Hume and Kant's views on skin color, the integrity of separate races, and the lower status of Africans provided support to diverse political, economic, and religious constituencies in Europe and the Americas interested in maintaining the transatlantic slave trade and upholding chattel slavery. The mental constructs and stereotypes of color-based races remained, more strongly in some places than others, after the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery. The concept of color-based hierarchies of people arranged from the superior light-colored people to inferior dark-colored ones hardened during the late seventeenth century and have been reinforced by diverse forces ever since. These ideas manifest themselves as racism, colorism, and in the development of implicit bias. Current knowledge of the evolution of skin color and of the historical development of color-based race concepts should inform all levels of formal and informal education. Awareness of the influence of color memes and race ideation in general on human behavior and the conduct of science is important.

That "Bulky Commodity, Tobacco"

Tobacco, like other popular commodities, both reflected the rhythms of early modern empires and contributed to them. People, goods, and ideas crossing the Atlantic Ocean often traveled as freight in vessels bound upon other business, and much of that was tobacco business. Using a variety of historical examples, the current article explores tobacco's economic, cultural, and labor-related worlds to show how one plant shaped institutions of human enslavement, altered colonial ecologies, offered new sensory possibilities, and ruined fortunes. Although now perhaps better known within medical contexts as a significant, preventable cause of death, tobacco as it is understood today is also a highly political, economic, and cultural product, characteristics that have shaped human relationships to the commodity over the centuries. The 17th and 18th centuries, for example, saw a dramatic rise in tobacco consumption in Europe alongside an influx of colonial natural products across the continent. The tobacco trade offered power and profit to some, exploitation and enslavement to others. It underwrote the rise of prominent merchant and political families while shaping the daily routines of countless enslaved men, women, and children tasked with growing the plant. Tobacco leaves also offered hopes of medical treatment and trustworthy business dealings, as well as a moment of respite on a long voyage. At every stage of its evolution into a global commodity, tobacco's meanings and roles changed, becoming more fully integrated into European empire and its structures of power and profit in the process.

Geopolitics of bitterness: Deciphering the history and cultural biogeography of Quassia amara L

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE

Quassia amara L. recently came into the spotlight in French Guiana, when it became the object of a biopiracy claim. Due to the numerous use records throughout the Guiana shield, at least since the 18th century, a thorough investigation of its origin seemed relevant and timely. In the light of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya protocol, questions about the origin of local knowledge are important to debate.

AIM OF THE STUDY

Defining cultural biogeography as the dynamics through space and time of biocultural complexes, we used this theoretical framework to shed light on the complex biogeographical and cultural history of Q. amara. We explored in particular the possible transfer of medicinal knowledge on an Old World species to a botanically related New World one by enslaved Africans in Suriname.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Historical and contemporary literature research was performed by means of digitized manuscripts, archives and databases from the 17th to the 21st century. We retrieved data from digitized herbarium vouchers in herbaria of the Botanic Garden Meise (Belgium); Naturalis Biodiversity Center (the Netherlands); Missouri Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum (USA); Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (UK); the IRD Herbarium, French Guiana and the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (France). Vernacular names were retrieved from literature and herbarium specimens and compared to verify the origin of Quassia amara and its uses.

RESULTS

Our exploration of digitized herbarium vouchers resulted in 1287 records, of which 661 were Q. amara and 636 were Q. africana. We observed that the destiny of this species, over at least 300 years, interweaves politics, economy, culture and medicine in a very complex way. Quassia amara's uses are difficult to attribute to specific cultural groups: the species is widely distributed in Central and South America, where it is popular among many ethnic groups. The species spread from Central to South America during the early 18th century due to political and economic reasons. This migration possibly resulted from simultaneous migration by religious orders (Jesuits) from Central America to northern South America and by Carib-speaking Amerindians (from northern South America to Suriname). Subsequently, through colonial trade networks, Q. amara spread to the rest of the world. The absence of African-derived local names in the Guiana shield suggests that Q. africana was not sufficiently familiar to enslaved Africans in the region that they preserved its names and transferred the associated medicinal knowledge to Q. amara.

CONCLUSIONS

Cultural biogeography has proven an interesting concept to reconstruct the dynamics of biocultural interactions through space and time, while herbarium databases have shown to be useful to decipher evolution of local plant knowledge. Tracing the origin of a knowledge is nevertheless a complex adventure that deserves time and interdisciplinary studies.

Chemistry and slavery in the Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment has long been identified with abolitionism because of the writings of the moral and economic philosophers and the absence of slaves in Scotland itself. However, Scots were disproportionately represented in the ownership, management, and especially medical treatment of slaves in the British Caribbean. Sugar and cotton flowed into Glasgow and young, educated Scots looking for work as traders, bookkeepers, doctors made the return trip back to the Caribbean to manage the plantations. Chemically trained doctors and agriculturalists tested their theories in the plantations and developed new theories based on their experimentation on the land and slaves. In foregrounding the participation of Scottish trained chemists in the practice of slavery, I argue that the development of eighteenth-century chemistry and the broader intellectual Enlightenment were inextricably entangled with the economic Improvement Movement and the colonial economy of the British slave trade.

Population change and the legacy of slavery

Despite increasing evidence of a contemporary legacy of slavery in the US South, scholars do not have a clear empirical understanding of the ways in which demographic forces can alter local connections to racial histories. In this study, we examine the influence of long-run trends in population change on the relationship between historical slave concentration and contemporary black-white poverty inequality in the American South. We combine one century and a half of county-level population data, including estimates of the slave and total populations in 1860, estimates of black and white population change starting in 1880, and black-white poverty disparities from the 2011-2015 American Community Survey. Our results offer new empirical evidence regarding the enduring influence of racial histories over time, and suggest that white population increase between 1880 and 1910 was particularly influential in understanding the local connection between slave concentration and black-white inequality. Moreover, rather than disrupting the transmission of the legacy of slavery, results indicate that white population increase may have helped spread this legacy of racial inequality to other counties through diffusion processes. We find that while local historical legacies are persistent, they are not permanent, and population trends are a critical force shaping local racial inequality.

From ethnobotany to emancipation: Slaves, plant knowledge, and gardens on eighteenth-century Isle de France

This essay examines the relationship between slavery and plant knowledge for cultivational activities and medicinal purposes on Isle de France (Mauritius) in the second half of the eighteenth century. It builds on recent scholarship to argue for the significance of slaves in the acquisition of plant material and related knowledge in pharmaceutical, acclimatization, and private gardens on the French colonial island. I highlight the degree to which French colonial officials relied on slaves' ethnobotanical knowledge but neglected to include such information in their published works. Rather than seeking to explore the status of such knowledge within European frameworks of natural history as an endpoint of knowledge production, this essay calls upon us to think about the plant knowledge that slaves possessed for its practical implementations in the local island context. Both female and male slaves' plant-based knowledge enriched - even initiated - practices of cultivation and preparation techniques of plants for nourishment and medicinal uses. Here, cultivational knowledge and skills determined a slave's hierarchical rank. As the case of the slave gardener Rama and his family reveals, plant knowledge sometimes offered slaves opportunities for social mobility and, even though on extremely rare occasions, enabled them to become legally free.

The Psychohistory of Child Maltreatment Among Antebellum Slaveholders: Part II

In the psychohistory of the antebellum South, the extent of child abuse in slaveholder families is important for understanding how members of the southern elite were reared and the extent to which they were infected with the toxic residue of their elders’ passions and rages. It is argued that the Old South was a developing region, rather than an already developed one. Consequently, the rate of child abuse that is characteristic of contemporary postindustrial societies is not the proper paradigm for conceptualizing the abuse rate in slaveholder families. It is proposed instead that the rate of child abuse in contemporary developing societies is a better fit for estimating abuse in the antebellum South. Societal and familial variables impinging on the abuse of slaveholder children—corporal punishment, alcohol consumption, hyper-masculinity, a traumatogenic culture of violence, wife abuse, maternal ambivalence and neglect, miscegenation and incest are discussed, as is the likelihood of maltreatment by slaves. Using a study of child abuse across 28 nations, tentative rates of abuse are proposed.

The Cultural Contingency of Structure: Evidence from Entry to the Slave Trade In and Around the Abolition Movement

The economic effects of social structure are dependent on culture and must be understood in their cultural context. The authors demonstrate this with an analysis of the Liverpool slave trade. They show that as abolitionism became more salient in British culture, connections in a coinvestment network to both slavers and nonslavers mattered much more for predicting entry into the slave trade. As abolitionism rose, nonslavers in that public network gained relatively more influence than slavers, but the reverse was true in the private network of an elite social club. Furthermore, the status of a potential slaver mattered much more during the abolition era, as the emergent clarity of norms against slaving constrained high-status traders less than middle-status traders. The authors present advice to network and status theorists as to how they can reflect cultural contingency even in studies conducted in stable cultural contexts, thereby creating a more integrated and robust economic sociology.

The African diaspora: history, adaptation and health

The trans-Atlantic slave trade brought millions of Africans to the New World. Advances in genomics are providing novel insights into the history and health of Africans and the diasporan populations. Recent examples reviewed here include the unraveling of substantial hunter-gatherer and 'Eurasian' admixtures across sub-Saharan Africa, expanding our understanding of ancestral African genetics; the global ubiquity of mixed ancestry; the revealing of African ancestry in Latin Americans that likely derived from the slave trade; and understanding of the ancestral backgrounds of APOL1 and LPL found to influence kidney disease and lipid levels, respectively, providing specific insights into disease etiology and health disparities.

Dynamics of Indian Ocean Slavery Revealed through Isotopic Data from the Colonial Era Cobern Street Burial Site, Cape Town, South Africa (1750-1827)

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) intended the Cape of Good Hope to be a refreshment stop for ships travelling between the Netherlands and its eastern colonies. The indigenous Khoisan, however, did not constitute an adequate workforce, therefore the VOC imported slaves from East Africa, Madagascar and Asia to expand the workforce. Cape Town became a cosmopolitan settlement with different categories of people, amongst them a non-European underclass that consisted of slaves, exiles, convicts and free-blacks. This study integrated new strontium isotope data with carbon and nitrogen isotope results from an 18th-19th century burial ground at Cobern Street, Cape Town, to identify non-European forced migrants to the Cape. The aim of the study was to elucidate individual mobility patterns, the age at which the forced migration took place and, if possible, geographical provenance. Using three proxies, 87Sr/86Sr, δ13Cdentine and the presence of dental modifications, a majority (54.5%) of the individuals were found to be born non-locally. In addition, the 87Sr/86Sr data suggested that the non-locally born men came from more diverse geographic origins than the migrant women. Possible provenances were suggested for two individuals. These results contribute to an improved understanding of the dynamics of slave trading in the Indian Ocean world.

The Psychohistory of Child Maltreatment Among Antebellum Slaveholders

Examining the inner workings of the slaveholder family, including slave caretakers, this article probes the psychodynamics of slaveholder development to assess the extent of child abuse in the Old South. Childcare was haphazard and premised on paternal absence, maternal ambivalence, and the exigencies of slave surrogacy. Corporal punishment, sanctified by southern religion, was the rule. The likelihood of slave negligence and retaliatory attacks against slaveholder children are addressed. Childrearing practices such as swaddling, aunt adoption, and maternal incest are considered, as well as the possible usage of a West African cleansing ritual. The article classifies planter families within the Ambivalent Mode of parent-child relations and suggests the restaging of childhood trauma as the underlying dynamic in the march to civil war.

Psychohistory and Family Among Antebellum Slaveholders

This article examines the macroscopic reasons for maternal rage and its injection into slaveholder children in the antebellum South. It is argued that the misogyny that infected antebellum life metastasized in southern mistresses and affected the way they felt about themselves and their children. As mothers, they were casual parents, concerned with molding the character of their charges, rearing warriors and proper ladies, but uninterested in caring for them and helping them realize their own aspirations. It is argued that the misanthropic rage that they injected into their children constituted the poison that each generation of slaveholders had to ventilate into poison containers, slaves, as a homeostatic means of psycho-emotional survival. This intergenerational process of poison injection--from father to mother, from mother to child, from child to slave, constituted the process that insured the perpetuation of the psychic structure necessary for the continuation of slavery from generation to generation.

Psychohistory and Slavery: Preliminary Issues

"Psychohistory and Slavery: Preliminary Issues," begins an examination of slavery in the antebellum South. The paper suggests that how slavery and the group-fantasy of white male supremacy were perpetuated among slaveholders is a question of fundamental importance for psychohistorians. The family and childrearing are the focus of attention. Given the ferocity of slavery, it is argued that the psychological and emotional consequences of this barbarism were not limited to the slaves themselves, but had significant impact on the slaveholders as well-their parenting, their children, and their children's parenting of the next generation. In each generation the trauma of slavery was injected into slaveholder children and became a fundamental component of elite Southern personality.

Materialism, slavery, and the history of Jamaica

This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner who published his History of Jamaica in 1774. Long's polygenism, it argues, looks strikingly different from that we are more familiar with from nineteenth-century sources. The reason for the difference is twofold. First, although Long was willing to buck biblical orthodoxy, he balked at materialism, a position that gained traction in racial studies following the successes of the phrenological movement in the early nineteenth century. Second, Long presents us with a (relatively rare) case of an eighteenth-century writer on "race science" with political sympathies toward a part of the world that was both outside the bounds of the European metropole and contained a majority black population. As a result, one finds a fundamental ambivalence in his writings on race, an ambivalence that stemmed directly from his desire to manage social relations and political systems in a slave society. Metropolitan figures who believed in-the fixity of race (regardless of the question of origin) made a cornerstone of their position the essential identity of newly arrived African slaves and their descendants. For Long, however, the difference between "salt-water" and "creole" Negroes was to be the solution to the most pressing social problem of the sugar islands: slave insurrection. This understanding of the (potential) political and social differences between generations of slaves required a physical corollary: Long's polygenism presumed less fixity than the monogenism of a figure like Immanuel Kant.

"[No] doctor but my master": Health reform and antislavery rhetoric in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the life of a slave girl

This essay examines Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) in light of new archival findings on the medical practices of Dr. James Norcom (Dr. Flint in the narrative). While critics have sharply defined the feminist politics of Jacobs's sexual victimization and resistance, they have overlooked her medical experience in slavery and her participation in reform after escape. I argue that Jacobs uses the rhetoric of a woman-led health reform movement underway during the 1850s to persuade her readers to end slavery. This essay reconstructs both contexts, revealing that Jacobs links enslaved women's physical and sexual vulnerability with her female readers' fears of male doctors' threats to modesty and of their standard bleed-and-purge treatments. Jacobs illustrates that slavery damages women's health as much as heroic medicine, and thus merits the political activism of her readers. Specifically, Jacobs dramatizes her conflicts with the rapacious physician-master at moments that are crucial to women's health: marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Ultimately, this essay advances a new understanding of the role of health reform in social change: it galvanized other movements such as women's rights and abolition, particularly around issues of bodily autonomy for women and African Americans.

"Ask a slave" and interpreting race on public history's front line: interview with Azie Mira Dungey

In this interview, Azie Mira Dungey (creator of the web series, "Ask a Slave") and Amy M. Tyson (Associate Professor of History at DePaul University and author of The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History's Front Lines) discuss Dungey's web series, as well as her experiences as a living history interpreter at both the Smithsonian Museum of American History and at Mount Vernon.

Before 1979: African American coachmen, visibility, and representation at Colonial Williamsburg

Before the living history museum of Colonial Williamsburg started its concerted interpretation of slavery in 1979, the African American coachmen were already representing the past and implicating black history and slavery in this restored eighteenth-century capital of Virginia. Various records of photographs, postcards, letters, newspaper clippings, oral history accounts, visitor observations, and corporate papers provide awindow to understand the social climates of the museum's period in the 1930s to the 1970s. This body of evidence supports the contention that the coachmen were visible and influenced public history within and outside the museum.

"An aristocracy of talent": the South Carolina physician-naturalists and their times

During the natural history movement of the 18th and early 19th centuries, Charleston as a center was rivaled in the United States only by Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Prominent physician-naturalists included Alexander Garden (for whom the gardenia is named), John Edwards Holbrook ("father of American herpetology"), and Francis Peyre Porcher (whose Resources of Southern Fields and Forests helped Confederates compensate for drug shortages). The Charleston physician-naturalists belonged to an "aristocracy of talent" as distinguished from the "aristocracy of wealth" of lowcountry planters, who probably did more than any other group to perpetuate slavery and propel the South toward a disastrous civil war. None of the physician-naturalists actively opposed slavery or secession, a reminder that we are all prisoners of the prevailing paradigms and prejudices of our times.

Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment and the circulation of Caribbean slavery-related knowledge: the establishment of the Brazilian coffee culture from a comparative perspective

The generation of enlightened Luso-Brazilians saw Caribbean slavery agriculture as the model to be emulated in Portuguese America. To do so, at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, they translated and published some texts originally elaborated in the Antilles. In this reformist environment, the coffee culture occupied a place of prominence. To understand the role of this knowledge in establishing the Brazilian coffee culture, the Brazilian case is compared with the Cuban. The intent is to demonstrate that in the Spanish colony, the productive coffee plan of Santo Domingo was implanted, while in Brazil a plan was created, supported by new standards of agricultural management that were founded on local knowledge.