The pervasiveness of antiblack racism in our 21st-century society highlights the need to study the sprawling roots of the invasive system that white people created to grasp and maintain power. This system took the form of a deliberate war against the lives of Black people across the Atlantic World.
Distinct theaters of this war are revealed in two new books. In Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, Vincent Brown asks us to reconsider slavery societies as battlefields and the era of the early modern Atlantic World as a period of extended diasporic war.
Meanwhile, in The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade, Manuel Barcia examines the war’s “contact zones”—for example, slaving ships as well as “barracoons,” where traders held enslaved people before and after their journey across the Atlantic—and how these spaces were ripe for the spread of disease.
The inequality of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade, these two books show, is evident in warfare and in health care. This power dynamic persisted after abolition and clearly shapes our current world. Brown and Barcia show that the “business of war” and the business of slave-trade abolition were critical to the expansion of European empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. While Brown studies what readers might immediately recognize as “warfare,” Barcia shows that the violence of illness in the illegal transatlantic slave trade during the 19th century was also a way that the “War of Atlantic Slavery” continued during the age of abolition.
The war continues. Today, violence is meted out against Black Lives Matter protestors as well as Black people generally. Today, disease is deployed against Black people, with either deliberate malice or thoughtless cruelty. As Dessalines predicted, the war, in fact, is not over. 2020 is just the latest battle front.
The “Atlantic War of Slavery,” according to Vincent Brown, was the long and sustained period of daily violence against enslaved Africans, interspersed with moments of explosive conflict. Brown’s reframing of slavery as war allows us to better understand enslaved people as soldiers, diplomats, sailors, and community leaders dedicated to Black freedom (both then and now).
Specifically, Brown’s book shows how—within the broader war—enslaved men, women, and children defended themselves and even counterattacked. By resisting the racist evidence left by white planters and colonial officials, who characterized enslaved people simply as forced labor—often in the fields on sugar and coffee plantations, but also in homes and cities—Brown acknowledges their previous lived experiences, their visions for the future, and the diversity of their lives under slavery.