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Mary E. Hicks, "Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2025)
01:06:43
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- [00:00]
Mary E. Hicks
Only Murders in The Building Season 5.
- [00:02]
Adam McNeil
The Hit Hulu Original is back.
- [00:04]
Mary E. Hicks
The night Buster died, he was talking with this mobster.
- [00:07]
Adam McNeil
Was he killed in a hit? We need to go face to face with the mob. Get ready for a season. Buongiorno, signore.
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Mary E. Hicks
This is how I die.
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Adam McNeil
You can't refuse. You're gonna save the day like you.
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Mary E. Hicks
Always do by being smart, sharp, and.
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Adam McNeil
Almost always by mistake.
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Mary E. Hicks
The Hulu Original series Only Murders in.
- [00:24]
Adam McNeil
The Building premieres September 9th.
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Mary E. Hicks
Streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.
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Adam McNeil
New episodes Tuesdays. Mike and Alyssa are always trying trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle.
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Mary E. Hicks
Mike showed up with a 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
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Adam McNeil
Oh, come on.
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Mary E. Hicks
They called a truce for their holiday.
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Adam McNeil
And used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool. Whatever. You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia Made to travel. @blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros.
- [01:09]
Mary E. Hicks
To handle it all, you'll have the.
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Adam McNeil
Confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is.
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Mary E. Hicks
Made to fit your life and your windows.
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Adam McNeil
Because@blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.
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Mary E. Hicks
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Adam McNeil
Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Adam McNeil, and on today's podcast, we are talking with Mary E. Hicks, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, and we are here to talk to her about her brand new book, Captive Cosmopolitans, Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery. Welcome to the podcast. Mary, how you doing?
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Mary E. Hicks
I'm doing great, thank you, Adam. And it's wonderful to talk to you in this venue after running into each other at conferences and really having some overlaps.
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Adam McNeil
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And you know, I should also say shout out to the Omohundro Institute as well, you know, and all the team over there for making this book happen. Because as Mary said, we've been interlocutors for some time now from the days of pre elon, you know, Twitter or I guess in a way, x is Elon. So the real Twitter to now. And so it is such a pleasure to have you on here to talk about this book that. Let me speak for slavery studies globally. We've been waiting for this book. We've been waiting. And so now we are happy that we have it. So praise the Lord for that. And so, you know, to, to kind of get us started here. Right. We were talking about this a bit offline. And so once again, the world has been waiting for this book and clearly you've been writing it and doing your thing and, and hitting all these milestones. But let's take us. Let's take it all the way back. Right, so can you actually tell us about the origin story behind Captive Cosmopolitans?
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Mary E. Hicks
Yeah. So I started as an eager grad student, I was much younger, and I began this journey really in the archives. I had a project in mind about enslaved women, particularly African born women, in the commercial urban spaces of the interior of Brazil. Right. So Minasoadaes region, which is a mountainous region. And I was really interested in the 18. I was interested in how these women leveraged, you know, their mobility, their commercial expertise to craft in some respects, the kind of lives to a limited extent that they wanted. And that did not pan out in the archives. I kept running into roadblocks. I found documents I wanted to use, but they were waterlogged and they were in restoration, which is what they, what they call it at the National Archive in Rio. And so I had to sort of turn on a dime really quickly to a different topic. And I just, you know, I don't think I would recommend this for any scholar, but I let my kind of intuition guide me. And I'd always been really fascinated by the idea of African peoples living approximate to the sea. You know, that's something that, that imagery kind of comes up in all these major studies of Brazilian slavery. Like if you look at Stuart Schwartz or Joseph Miller or Mary Karash, even more recently, like Florida, Flavio dos Santos Gomez and Joanne de Haysh's book on Rufino, who was a seaman, a mariner. This kind of imagery of black people in the sea comes up repeatedly on the edges of these grand studies. And so I just sort of on a whim, started doing some searching when I was in Lisbon and I found a petition written by four enslaved sailors for their freedom. This was in 1797. And just the language of the petition itself really grabbed me. It was a free soil petition, which meant that these men were claiming that because they had set foot on Portuguese soil and that act was supposed to legally confer them freedom according to a 1761 law, that they should be free, that they should claim what they called their natural liberty. And the sophistication, the cosmopolitanism of their language and their rhetoric really intrigued me. And I sort of decided impulsively, like, okay, I'm gonna go down this rabbit hole and see where it leads me. And then from there, you know, building on the work of some other scholars, like Jaime Rodriguez, who's a Brazilian scholar, and others, and kind of looking in archives that they had looked, as well as some new archives, I really pieced together this story about Black Mariners and 18th and early 19th century Salvador, Bahia, which is in the northeast of Brazil.
- [06:17]
Adam McNeil
You would think after nearly over 120 interviews I've done in my career, that I would not get muted by my own self, which is crazy, you know, So, y', all, we are in Zoom land here, so we can see each other, but y' all will not be able to hearing this. So just, you know, a quick footnote. Somehow, some way this late in the game, almost 10 years in, still muting myself, but that's another story. But back on task here, you mentioned you were in Lisbon when the pivot point happened. So you went to Lisbon thinking you were going to do this project on black women. Right? That's. That's fascinating. Right? That is, especially as someone has, you know, come out of graduate school and has similar stories of, like, how things have shape shifted in a way where I guess we were technically flipped. I initially was gonna do a project all the way up until I got to Rutgers, actually, in 2019. I was gonna do a project, a dissertation on black mariners. And I ended up doing. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That's. So we can. You know, we could talk a bit later about this at a later time. But, like, the spartanized version of it is like, I ended up writing a story about or a dissertation about imperial. Imperial refuge and imperial belonging effectively of black women, primarily from Virginia and the American Revolution. And it's a very coastal story, although not maritime necessarily, but a very coastal story that's much less aquatic than yours. But some of the questions I have coming out as I'm revising for the book are a lot to do with, what are black women doing on these docks? What are they doing in these maritime spaces where they are not getting on the boat to sail to Bermuda or to the other ports of the Caribbean or throughout the Atlantic world, but how are they contributing to this kind of, you know, space? It's kind of like what Sasha Turner wrote in the HR a couple years ago about where black women are in the Commonwealth, for example. So it's interesting how we kind of paralleled different geographies, but kind of like stories change or trajectories, you know, historiographically changing. So, see, I knew. I knew you was cool. Very. But now it's like, I feel like we even parallel in other kind of ways, too. So I appreciate you for taking us on that kind of journey. But in terms of journeys, Right. A lot of times people don't have the chance. Right. They'll read a book, but they won't actually have your voice. Right. You're not the audiobook, you know, actor or actress in this. So to give folks a little bit of a taste, right. Of what you're doing here, can you read a passage from Captive Cosmopolitans so that our listeners and future readers, purchasers of the book can have a bit of a flavor of what you're trying to argue and discuss broadly in the text, if you don't mind.
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Mary E. Hicks
Yeah. I want to share a piece from my introduction, which I feel like kind of encapsulates a lot of what I'm trying to say in the book. African and Creole mariners spent their lives in the spaces in between, between continents, between statuses, and between cultures. Their seamless movement through vast oceanic environments was mirrored in their metaphorical boundary crossing. The ability to operate across distinct social, cultural, and political spaces provided mariners with the means to survive and sometimes even flourish. Their protean subjectivities, forged between Africa and Brazil, enriched and empowered a handful of slaving merchants and slave owners on land. Many of the black mariners had already been displaced from homelands, severed from ties of kin and community, and alienated from recognizable forms of language and culture. From this position of exclusion and exploitation, they attempted to insert themselves into the webs of patronage that structured Salvador's social landscape. They joined Catholic associations, constructed new social ties with workmates and acquired languages beyond their mother tongues. Doing so meant submitting to signorial authority in exchange for protection and perhaps the promise that one day they would become patrons themselves. Such vertical ties of solidarity became one of the few avenues for social rebirth available to black seamen. And they fashioned their own transatlantic networks of knowledge, goods, and rumor as a means of acquiring autonomy, social power, and self fulfillment. Insisting that they, too, should be able to reap the benefits of transatlantic commerce, they learned that doing so was one of the surest means of converting oneself from object to subject, from slave to freeman. The wealth accrued from hawking an assortment of West African goods could purchase manumission. For some, trading privileges could lead to a respectable life of property ownership in slaves and land for the very few. Transatlantic exchange supported the formation of extensive networks of cultural and social power within Bahia's African community. If individual mariners could not transform the slave society they inhabited into a more egalitarian one, at least they could transform their place within it.
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Adam McNeil
See, that's why y' all gotta buy the book. She's taking us there, y'. All. And actually, before we get all the way there, I wanted to ask also, Right. You know, we had talked before about your colleague, you know, Rashauna Johnson, as well as Chicago, and talking about, you know, the kind of parallel usages of cosmopolitan captive. For you, I believe, confined for. For Rashauna as well. But for you and captive cosmopolitans to take the captive away. And just look at cosmopolitans and cosmopolitanism. How are you defining that as, you know, your form of analysis here? Because, you know, obviously, captive cosmopolitans and cosmopolitanism are concepts that you see obviously weave throughout the book. Since it's, you know, one of your major. Your major forms of historiographic contributions. Right. So for you, how are you thinking about it? And also, how did that develop as well?
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Mary E. Hicks
Yeah, so. Yeah, so I really am fascinated. And you see that in Rashauna Johnson's work as well, my colleague, in this notion of vexed mobility and cultural plasticity. So it's very true that the men, largely men that I'm writing about, are highly. I mean, they are traveling sometimes, like thousands of miles in their lifetime. Because they take multiple voyages through the course of their lives. Many of them are multilingual. They speak not only like, multiple African languages, West African languages, but they also can speak Portuguese, sometimes other European languages. And so even in the documents themselves, it was always coming across to me that they saw themselves as individuals who could operate in different cultural and social and political milieus. And that, to me, is a kind of hallmark of cosmopolitanism. In the sort of Eurocentric view, it means citizen of the world. However, what I think a lot of historians of slavery have done is complicate that kind of celebratory notion of cosmopolitanism by linking it with a notion of coercion or compulsion or even violence. Right. Like the innate violence of needing to transform yourself in order to survive. And so, for me, the cosmopolitanism I'm talking about, in some ways, there's, like, echoes of Ira Berlin's idea of Atlantic Creole. But there's a lot of really interesting new scholarship by Aofema Kido Nawako. I'm sorry if I misread that name. Laurel Semley, Natasha Lightfoot, Linda Haywood and John Thornton, who are all kind of playing with this idea of creolization or cosmopolitanism as being both ensconced in the local and the global, but also, you know, being subject to the kind of ravages of colonialism, enslavement, and increasingly, merchant capitalism, which is what my book is about. So for me, I'm really interested in the tension in that label, but also that people could use their kind of cultural flexibility as a form of empowerment, but that's also the same thing that made them valuable to enslavers. That is a huge part of the book. Right. What is the kind of monetary value of a culturally dexterous laborer in this early modern world who can be bound as a captive?
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Adam McNeil
Yeah. And to your point, thinking about, like, cosmopolitan and Creole as almost like synonyms for each other, but then it makes you think as well. Like, you know, I think. You know what? I think I tweeted this around, like, a couple years ago, and I think I either directly asked you, or you answered it for me about do people still use Ira Berlin's Atlantic Creole as, like a. As a. As a teaching tool. Right. Do people still agree with that? Because I remember one person, I think I heard mention how, in an oppositional frame to Elena Creel saying, does that just effectively. Are we effectively saying that early modern west and West Central Africans were just easier people to make slaves because of their interactions with European and primarily Iberian powers and cultures? And how far does that take? Right. Especially when you know the English French differently than the Iberian powers. Right. Dealt with. Right. And you kind of talk about this, right? In the sense of, like, the differences with the South Atlantic versus North Atlantic. And so what I appreciated about your work is that effectively, by virtue of the lived experiences of South Atlantic slavery and the defining differences, but then also on that end, like, that's kind of just pregnant and like, that always sitting there. But, like, you also take it a little further in that you are confronting the fact of, you know, and I think I listened to. To prepare for this, I listened to your OI conversation from, I think, the summertime or a couple months ago with James Sweet. And I think there was a question about how do you. Or implication about how do you deal with, like, the quote unquote, ideas about complicity, you know, and in a way, you interacted with it. But what I appreciated was, like, complicity. I don't even think is the right word. Because they were, you know, you're writing about merchant capital. They were involved, their labor. They were, you know, quote unquote, valuable. But their labor on the high seas literally made, not only them valuable, but literally made everything turn in the sense of how Brazilian society turned, you know, so not to, you know, the belabor the point here, but I just want to say, like, that those are some areas in which, you know, I was really interested in, and you helped me to think it through. A lot of stuff, I should say.
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Mary E. Hicks
Well, thank you. And I hope that this book, because it is so geographically expansive, will speak across some of these conventional boundaries that we tend to erect in our profession, where I'm a specialist of the British Empire, I'm a specialist of the Spanish Empire. And in many ways, I try to read very broadly. And so I hope to be able to represent and partake in some of these conversations, these debates that are happening in other kind of imperial contexts. Right. And historiography, I would say. I don't know. I always like Berlin. One of the first books about the history of slavery I read when I was an undergraduate was many thousands gone. And I still think his grounding of the history of African Americans in these materialist processes of labor. Right. Like, what kind of labor regime you're inserted into, being so determinate of all these different facets of your life in some ways, you know, I'm not an orthodox Marxist by any sense, but I think in some respects that is exactly correct. Right. We have to really be attentive to these material processes and how we think about, you know, social relations and culture. Beyond that, I would say, you know, just to be upfront, my critique of Berlin's idea of Atlantic Creole and how it's been taken up by other scholars is that we sort of have Atlantic Creoles at the very beginning of the Atlantic, and then we have Atlantic Creoles at the age of revolution. It's unclear what's happening in the 17th century where they go, and then also in the 19th century. But, like, I would argue that it's a form of labor, a way of being in the world. This kind of cultural flexibility that is always relevant, is always in demand, and is always, you know, at least for slaveholders, a way that they attempt to extract profit from enslaved people's lives, really, because it's beyond just their bodies that they're extracting value from. It's really through this sense of, you know, how they're representing this kind of vast skill set that they have including certain cultural fluencies and knowledges that allows them to work on the transatlantic slave trade and be able to translate what captives held in cargoes are saying, what individuals on the West African coast are saying, because some of these men are actually at the point of buying captives, are helping to negotiate these kind of economic interactions. And so I would say that of the people who work with this idea of creolization, I really like Heywood and Thornton's emphasis on violence on the West Central African coast as being the thing that can create a creole. Right. And I think sometimes that Berlin, I mean, even though I don't think he's at all sort of romanticizing slavery, I think sometimes that kind of falls away from some of his theorization of the term, because he wants to posit that the early Atlantic world is in some ways more fluid than the later Atlantic world would become.
- [21:51]
Adam McNeil
Right. And I also think about that too, because, like, that book came out in 98, if I'm not mistaken. So it's almost 30 years. So just thinking about the influence it's had since it came out, you know, and also just thinking about, like, although the book came out in 98, he's been writing, you know, he's writing it. I was born 92, well before I was even thought in the world, you know, so like a minute ago, you know what I'm saying? I think like the 70s or 80s or whatever. So we're talking about history historiography here. So. So it's. We kind of reached towards it. So let's grab the bull bar. That's horn to talk about it.
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Mary E. Hicks
Right.
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Adam McNeil
What are the histographic stakes of captive cosmopolitans, in your view?
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Mary E. Hicks
Yeah, so I think it's working with some of this newer historiography on cosmopolitanism. The other person I should mention is Pablo Gomez, who writes about 17th century black healers in the Caribbean as being intellectual cosmopolitans, you know, to kind of match Rashauna Johnson's work in that field. A big inspiration for me, even though I have some departures from this approach. Stephanie Camp's work on the spatial logics of slavery. Right. How much does physical captivity and really the structuring of space influence what it means to be an enslaved person? And what I'm saying is a little bit different because I'm writing about a different set of historical actors. These aren't enslaved women on the antebellum plantation, you know, that are sort of locked into a physical space. These are men who are traveling on the high seas because of their labor. But I do think that slavery, early modern slavery, has a kind of spatial logic to it. And that compulsed movement is just as important into making what a slave can be as sequestered movement. Right? And so I hope that people who are interested in these questions of how enslaved people move through space and how they remade space through that movement, which I think is a huge kind of question that's being debated right now, and in part influenced by other fields like Black geographies, Catherine McKittrick, et cetera. I hope this book has something to say about that, because these people aren't just captive in these spaces. They're actually really on the frontier. They're making these aquatic spaces what they are. From the very first decades of Portuguese colonization of Brazil, from the early 16th century, they're really making these spaces what they are by pioneering different ways of being in aquatic environments, by understanding how to extract resources from the environment, understanding things like winds, currents, tides. That is all sort of generated community, generated ecological knowledge that transforms the way that Portuguese colonists are able to inhabit the northeast of Brazil. So I hope I have something to say about that. There's so many debates in our field right now. I just. I always say that I feel incredibly lucky because it's so lively, and I feel like it is. Not many fields have that, right. Where, you know. And I feel like we very well, not always, but mostly very respectfully disagree, you know, we.
- [25:14]
Adam McNeil
We'll find someone out tomorrow that's the opposite. But, you know.
- [25:19]
Mary E. Hicks
Yeah, exactly. Well, you would probably know better than me because you interviewed enough people. But we try to respectfully disagree, and that's because we're passionate about the material, right? And we feel that there's a real stakes to how you interpret this material. And so, you know, the history, the legal history of slavery. The fourth chapter of my book is really about how enslaved seamen, along with black Catholic brothers in Lisbon, tried to remake free soil laws, beginning in the 1761 in Portugal into instruments of liberation, right? And how their very movement could have subversive legal implications, right? Because they were breaking down this boundary between metropole and colony, right? They were claiming Portuguese subjecthood, imperial subjecthood. They were claiming themselves as Catholic subjects, right? So all these ways that they used legal argumentation, but also just sort of clandestine forms of movement to remake Portuguese law. It doesn't begin as an emancipatory legal statute at all. And it slowly becomes that through their legal argumentation over the course of many decades. So I think historiographical debate that exists, at least in the Latin American field is really to what extent can we see the enslaved exercising real legal agency, right. Or are they just sort of captured by Iberian law, you know, as a kind of hegemonic force that disciplines them in all these ways? And I think it's probably a little bit of both, right. The other historiographical debate that's I think really important to at least the South Atlantic is to what extent African influences, African derived influences are important in the New World, right? So how can we account for the emergence of things like Condomble, which I talk about at the end of my book? It's an Afro Brazilian religion that is inspired by various cult religious practices in places like Nigeria, Benin, Togo, modern day. And my answer is really that semen themselves are very important vehicles for creating this religious culture in Brazil because they bring the material cultures of West Africa to Brazil, right? In their own personal investments in the slave trade, in palm oil and textiles, they're able to bring these religiously powerful objects from West Africa to Brazil and then provide a way for people who are displaced by the transatlantic slave trade to begin to create a kind of set of ideas around those materials in Brazil, imbuing them with new meaning, new ways of signifying their identities, right? To the broader by, in public, new ways of signifying their power, their spiritual power to other people. And so I definitely think I come down firmly on the side that West African precedents were important points of inspiration that people mobilized, but that they weren't traditional in any sense, right? That they were always kind of evolving and drawing from new ideas and new cultures. And they were also operating a much different context, right? To be enslaved in Brazil is a very different context than being in your natal community in West Africa, where many of these people are coming from.
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Adam McNeil
And with that, it also brings up your discussion makes me, as I was thinking about the end of your book, when you talk about condom ballet, you know, I'm here at Uva, Carji Woodson, postdoc and thinking about, you know, you were trained here at Uva as well. So briefly, like was that particular chapter that you had mentioned before that book ended the book and maybe others. What changed between the dissertation and the book that we. That I have in front of me and that the world that's listening to it will have in front of them when they purchase the book?
- [29:24]
Mary E. Hicks
Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, Uva and what came after were hugely. Both hugely influential. I was at Uva at such an amazing time. And I hasten to say this because it'll probably make a Lot of other people jealous. But while I was there, there was like a one to one ratio of professors to grad students in my.
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Adam McNeil
That is amazing. That is beautiful. Lord have mercy.
- [29:48]
Mary E. Hicks
We were lavish with attention. We had so many great scholars there and scholars who were broadly read, really. So my advisor was Brian Owensby. I worked with Tom Klubach. I worked very closely with Hoki Naldo Feira, who's now at Penn, who writes about Angola and slavery. And in the 19th century. Joseph Miller, who of course was a titan of the field and just knew so much about the bibliography of slavery. He compiled Slavery and Abolition's bibliography every year on that topic. And so just the kind of vast resources I had at my disposal. And really that my advisors emphasized that I could both be trained in Africanist field and also Brazilianist field. And really putting equal emphasis on both of those to the extent that I couldn't hide it if I didn't know what I was talking about or one or the other. So I really had to, like, dig deep, you know, because you're reading a lot. I had huge comps lists that were just ongoing and they were really starting points, but they allowed me to kind of immerse myself. You know, Joe Miller was really influential in terms of thinking critically about how we define slavery. So he introduced me to all the kind of classic works. Claude Miya sue, you know, Suzanne Meyer's and Igor Kopitov's work. You know, so there are a lot of Africanist texts about what slavery is that I think it behooves all Atlanticists to read, really, especially people who are writing directly about people who were born in Africa and maybe they were displaced in the slave trade when they were children or adolescents, but that context still really is important. And then what came after? So after having, like, really rigorous training at UVA and really being pushed to explore archives, I remember, you know, Hokinol Veera bringing me in, and he was like, you really just need to sit down at these archives and really take it in, drink it in, and you're gonna go through a lot of material and a lot of it's gonna be useless to you, but you really have to push yourself. So I ended up spending about 18 months in the archives when I was a grad student across Brazil and England and Portugal. And then when I got to Amherst College, which was my first job post Getting my PhD, I had some wonderful colleagues in African studies who pushed me again. Yeah, they pushed me again. And they weren't historians either. So that was another way in which, you know, I was kind of pushed out of this disciplinary training. I would say my training was already pretty disciplined. Interdisciplinary teaching at the Woodson and then also, like, you know, working under Joe Miller. He's just like, okay, you have to read it all. You have to read anthropology. You have to read economics. So he was already that kind of mind. But my colleague Roland Abiodoun, I remember I presented my material on black healers who were bloodletters in the chapter from my book that you read. It's. It's the penultimate chapter. And it's really trying to understand, like, what were the ideas animating this practice of bloodletting? Like, can we find some African antecedents? You know, is this a kind of medical syncretism that's happening between Iberian, like, humoral medicine and West African? And I really found that it was because he was pushing me to really look at my sources critically, because he's like, okay, well, they're bloodletting from the head. They're not bloodletting from here. That means something, right? Or they're wearing this, and that means something. Like my material on cloth. You know, what I wrote about African material culture in Brazil. A lot of that was inspired by sitting down and talking with him about the significance of color, about the significance of pattern, about objects as agentive. And he's written some brilliant books about this very question, about some of the ontological categories we have for understanding things like the commodity or the art object don't make sense in. Well, he's writing specifically about Nigeria, but we could say more broadly West African context. So he really pushed me, you know, And I work with so many people, great people in that department. John Drabinski, Radha Cobham Sander, who was a literature person who made me think a lot harder about aesthetics and what they mean and what they communicate than I had as a historian. So I really just found that after I graduated, I was even able to even deepen my kind of appreciation for Africanist literature on a range of subjects. And that really informed the kinds of conclusions I came to in my book, which I hope people find interesting. Because I want to talk about archives. And it's a project that's very grounded in the archive. The colonial archive. Precisely. But it's also about paraarchives, which is this idea I introduce of looking at other repositories of enslaved people's consciousness beyond just the textual.
- [35:08]
Adam McNeil
Yeah. And I think, you know, what's the word dexterous, I think, would be applicable here. And also just. It's a It's a diverse book in the sense of how you're weaving black mariners into the story. Right. Of. Of all of these different areas, which in a way is the uniqueness of South Atlantic slavery compared to, you know, what may probably, I would assume most listeners to the new books in African American studies, podcasts, and the broader network probably have a much. Well, if you have a firm grasp, which we know is not the case for the majority of people, just generally speaking, but at least in the sense of what people think they understand, it's probably more obviously like the antebellum or at the very least the North Atlantic. So I actually thought it would be helpful for maybe those listeners who are not, you know, specialists in slavery studies or not specialists in the. The world of. In the Atlantic world, rather for you to actually take a little bit of time to actually carve out a bit about what are the. What were the. Some of the differences with South Atlantic and North Atlantic slavery just generally, but then also to think about. Thinking about. Well, it's good for an interviewer not to ask two questions at once, so we'll just leave it at that. And I'll get to some of the other things I'm thinking about, too, for the next one.
- [36:44]
Mary E. Hicks
Yeah. So the comparison between north and South Atlantic is the kind of thing that's looming in the background of my book. And I don't want to do too much to make these seem, like, totally distinct, radically, you know, different places, because I do think there's some overlap. And of course, people travel from, like, let's say, the Caribbean to France in the course of my book, as they're, like, escaping slavery. So there is a lot of crisscrossing happening. But I think that the most important thing, and the fact that kind of grounds the entire book is that demographically, seafarers in the South Atlantic are much blacker. Right. So in my book, I've established in the early 19th century that about 35% of all mariners in the transatlantic slave trade from Bahia, from the northeast of Brazil, are actually born in Africa. An additional 10% are of African descent, and about 30% of all mariners in the slave trade are enslaved. Right. And this is compared to what other historians have written about, like, let's say, Bristol and Liverpool, where only a tiny portion of a. Of seamen are of African descent, and they live on the fringes of shipboard societies. So these are arguments that other scholars have made. And so just demographically, once I established that fact, I went through so many muster rolls that's what they're called, which are registers of crews on these ships. And many of them had like 40 to 50 men. They're quite large crews because it takes more seafarers to man a slaver than other kinds of ships. And so once I began to establish that fact through my reading of the sources, then my mind turned to, well, what kind of influence do these men exercise on board? Right? Because this is not a marginal group of people. And in some ships, they're more like 80% of all crew members are African or of African descent. And so I think the fundamental difference is that, you know, in the North Atlantic, seamen are mostly contract laborers. And of course, they're subject to all these forms of coercion. You know, they're living on the margin society in many ways. People have written eloquently about this. But they're free, right? And they're more mobile and they're less subject to harsh forms of discipline. They cannot be sold away, for instance, for insubordination. So even though there is this kind of constant battle between captain and crew on ships in the North Atlantic, it takes a different valence in the South Atlantic because these men are enslaved. They're bondsmen, and then they're inserted into these kind of patronage networks. Oftentimes they're owned by the ship captain or the ship owner or other officers on board. And so they're not free contract laborers, even though some of them are freedmen. And they do contract their labor. So they have a different laboring status. And they're also bringing these remnants of African culture aboard. So I really try to argue that the slaving ship is not just a laboring space. It's not just a space of creating or accumulating capital through the bodies of bonspeople trafficked from West Africa. But it's also a space of culture, right, and cultural transmission. And I look specifically at the law, at the relationships between mariners aboard, which I argue is a kind of tenuous fraternity at times even across lines of race. And then I also look at medicine and material culture.
- [40:24]
Adam McNeil
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Mary E. Hicks
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- [41:18]
Adam McNeil
Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch.
- [41:23]
Mary E. Hicks
Yet, here are 15 reasons why you should.
- [41:26]
Adam McNeil
One, it's $15 a month.
- [41:28]
Mary E. Hicks
Two, seriously, it's $15 a month.
- [41:31]
Adam McNeil
Three, no big contracts.
- [41:32]
Mary E. Hicks
Four, I use it.
- [41:34]
Adam McNeil
Five, my mom uses it. Are you, are you playing me off?
- [41:36]
Mary E. Hicks
That's what's happening, right? Okay, give it a try. @mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan, options available, taxes and fees, extra Cementmobile.
- [41:48]
Adam McNeil
Com and you know, one of the things that your book made me think a lot about, right? Because having once again finished the dissertation, thinking about what are the things that are left for me, which is a lot, but what are the things that are left for me to know, right? It's like the big stuff, right? But then it's like the more granular details of skills. Like if you say that someone was a washerwoman, what does that actually mean materially? Like, what does that mean in terms of how they're, like, what are their hands? What do washer women's hands feel? Right, at that kind of sensorial level, which also made me think, in the sense of your book, we say mariners, we say African born. We have these percentages. But then I have to think for myself, right? I was born and raised in Florida. I'm 33 years old. I do not know how to swim. So I think. So when I read your book, I'm thinking about like even just at the level of acquisition, right? Which is a long preamble way for me to ask, how do these men develop the skills for them to be a part of this broad system, right? Where they are on these ships, participating in different occupations, professions, even, how do they acquire these skills? But then also are there. You talk about African antecedents, but I'm thinking like, are they, are they. How does one say that I want this enslaved person to be or this captive person to be a seafarer, a semen, waterman, whatever you want to, whatever area that they're in. So. So at the level of acquisition of skills, what does that look like for the men involved in your story?
- [43:42]
Mary E. Hicks
That's a really interesting callback, Adam. I just want to highlight what you say, like, I can't swim. And, you know, it's. This historical period is so interesting because maybe when we think about, you know, African American communities and their relationship with the water, we maybe think about, like, displacement from coastal landscapes, right, during the era of neoliberalism or during the era of Jim Crow, or we think about not having access to public pools because of segregation or pool closures and public divestment from, like, municipal amenities, right? And that means, like, fewer black people can swim, basically. I mean, that's just what the demo, you know, the kind of demographics tell us. But in the era that I'm talking about, like, as soon as Europeans are arriving in West Africa, literally talking about, like, the 1440s, they are highlighting, like, oh, these people, these Africans are preternaturally good swimmers, you know, so there's this notion of kind of black aquatic knowledge and fluency that gets cemented in the kind of colonial mind very early on in the enslaving mind very early on. And so because many of the merchants and enslavers that I write about are actually involved in the slave trade in some way, the easiest thing for them to do is just merely these individuals that they're trafficking. And there is a strong. In the Portuguese Atlantic, there's a strong preference for, like, adolescent males. So we can say from, like, ages 12 to 15, sort of before they're, you know, having a beard. That would be the sort of mark of, you know, facial hair is the mark of adulthood. So these slavers would go purchase, attempt to purchase adolescent males on the West African coast and then almost immediately try to sort of flip them into being maritime laborers. Right? And, you know, the story I use in the book is Joan de Oliveira, who is captured probably in the early 1710s on the west African coast. He's sold away. He becomes a slave of a ship captain in Pernambuco, and then he's going back and forth between Brazil and Africa before he becomes a merchant on the West African coast. And then he eventually comes back to Brazil in 1770, where he's arrested for smuggling. And so, you know, his trajectory is a really, I think, good example of the notion that young boys from West Africa were particularly plas. You know, they had a kind of plasticity. They could learn Portuguese, they could be converted to Catholicism, and they could learn what they called the art of seafaring. Right. And what does the art of seafaring look like? So black men on these ships would basically inhabit every sort of occupation except for there are a handful of pardo or mixed race captains at the end of the book. But mostly they would be common sailors. They would be coopers, carpenters, and then made up about 90% of all medical practitioners. Right. So bloodletters and barbers on these ships. And how do they learn it? They learn how any sort of artisanal labor or learns a skill which is through practice. Right. They're not sitting down, they're not studying things in the kind of abstract. They're really like apprentices when they're cabin boys. And then they can become a common sailor or maybe they're apprenticed in another skill aboard the ship, like making barrels or making the kind of. They would erect these platforms to prevent enslaved people from, you know, rebelling on board. Right. And that would be one of the jobs of the carpenters also, including, like, maintaining like, the hole of the ship and the soundness of the ship and all these things. And being a common sailor itself. I mean, it sounds kind of, you know, like it wouldn't require that many skills, but there's so many lines, you know, on these huge, you know, vessels that you have to know how to steer the sails in certain sorts of ways. You have to know how to maintain the ships. And then the other layer is you have to be part of managing enslaved people held in the cargo.
- [47:55]
Adam McNeil
Yeah. And so, like I said, like that. I appreciate you for answering that in such vivid detail because when I was reading it, that was like, one of the first things I wanted was like, hold on. I've tried to learn how to swim specifically because I wasn't taught, you know, when I was like one or two. So I have. My first form of consciousness is knowing that I'm okay in the water. When I was in my early 20s and I was going to do a tough motor for the first time, one of my friends at FAMU who was Navy rotc, we, we went to the. We went to the pool, the little pool at our campus. He, like, taught me, like, over the course of like a week, so I wouldn't like, die when I go through, like, the water if I fall in or something. But, but I use that example as, like, as a way of saying, like, although I was, you know, may be of the ages of some of the young men who were taken captive, but it's just like if someone dubs you that, then you have to do it. Right. And so that. That was why. But then it also connected to a conversation that I had, I think, back in 2019, when I interviewed Kevin Dawson about undercurrents of power. Right. And thinking about, like, even some of the work that he does, along with his scholarly work, thinking about, like, some of. I don't know if he has a nonprofit, but I know he's been working in his community about, you know, promoting the history of African aquatic culture as a way to say, to your point, about this 15th century, you know, memoirs about, like, being on the African coast and. And such. Right. That what is current is not historically accurate to the broader experience of people of African descent. So, yeah, I appreciate you for connecting with that. And so we're pivoting towards the final portion of our time here today. So one of the questions I actually had that's left over. And in certain ways, you've kind of, in different ways mentioned it. But as someone who is not as well versed in the Brazilianist literature, in the South Atlantic literature more broadly, one thing. Scott Heerman is a new editor of the oi, and I think this is a perfect time to insert his quotation from when we were in the McNeil Center. When we were at the McNeil center in 2324. He told. I don't know if it was directly me, but he said, if you want to find the best. The best right. Literature on slavery studies, don't go to the North Atlantic. You got to go to the South Atlantic. You got to go to this, to. To the Brazilianists and, you know, effectively, the. What makes up this book. Effectively, right? Because you're. Because effectively, like the quote unquote, more heralded works, generally speaking, are coming not only from people of the North Atlantic, but also, like, writing about it. But the reason why I bring that up is because your work helps us to also think about the complications of what liberal freedom is, because your work is also within this timeframe of the quote, unquote, Age of Revolutions, the majority of the work. So it makes me think a lot about how your work actually complicates our ideas about these forms of liberal freedom, because, as you point out, these captive men, whether through these liberty chests or these other. They were complicit ain't the right word, because they were certainly involved right into a North Atlantic kind of understanding of the Atlantic slave trade that might seem actually a little like, whoa, hold on, what's going on here? So can you talk to us a bit more about how your work kind of complicates these particular ideas about liberal freedom with the mariners that you write about.
- [52:14]
Mary E. Hicks
Yeah. So the other kind of body of scholarship I could have mentioned in one of your earlier questions, plus I want to point out how controversial that statement is. You gotta read Brazilian scholarship on slavery. I mean, I happen to agree with it, but not everyone might. But so some of the earlier or some of the earlier scholarship on black mariners was North Atlantic stuff like Jeffrey Bolster, you know, Marcus Rediker has kind of gone more and more into this field. Other, you know, the Waterman song and a lot of these pieces. Oh, Common Wind, of course, being Julia Scott being the grandfather of them all. And a lot of these tend to emphasize the kind of abolitionist political worldviews that mariners developed because of, I would argue, like their cosmopolitan. They're essentially describing cosmopolitanism. What, what Scott is talking about, rumor and these kind of networks of communication and the spread of radical ideas through. Through maritime movement, I would say is a kind of cosmopolitanism. But for me, when you look at the South Atlantic, so those are North Atlantic spaces. And when you look at the South Atlantic, a less clear picture of these sailors being invested in liberal abolitionism at this moment, at this rupture that we could say really starts with the Haitian revolution. Right. They came to different understandings of what freedom could mean with them because a lot of them were striving for freedom through manumission, right? Through being legally free, freed by their slaveholder or owner. And, you know, many of them actually were more interested in establishing a household of their own, of accumulating a wife, children, dependence, which could include enslaved people of their own with their free status, than they were of creating, let's say, a kind of universalist notion of black liberation. Right. And so what do we do with this knowledge that they just didn't use these horrifying experiences of being trafficked as enslaved people and then working on these slave ships, which are terrible working environments. You know, many people died of disease. It's violent, it's exploitative. You're harming other people, right. And you're. And you're part of this process of violent commodification. Why didn't they just come to this sort of realization that slavery in itself was bad? You know, they. They saw themselves as, you know, people who could rise through the ranks of patronage, and they created spheres of influence within Salvador's urban landscape that gave them a kind of cultural and social status in the West African community there that for maybe for them was more important than, you know, legal rights. Right. Or an abstract sense of freedom. You know, I think Jessica Marie Johnson is particularly good on this point is like, you know, freedom is more than just a legal status and there's all these different ways of imagining what, what freedom meant. And you know, black people across the Atlantic world imagine it in different ways. Right. And for some it doesn't mean the kind of universal end of slavery. And nor does it mean, you know, I think some of the mariners, especially those who are, who are active in these free soil legal petitions, do you come to a more sort of natural right, you know, a notion that nobody should be enslaved or there shouldn't be racial discrimination in the law understanding by the end of the 19th century. But that's really a pocket. Right. And it's not everybody. And they also, you know, a lot of mariners find themselves alienated from, let's say, British abolitionism on the West African coast because it's a very violent process of liberating these slave ships. And they're caught up in the middle of it. Right. And they could lose their wages, they could lose their investments on these slaving ships. And so to me, I think they kind of craft their own notion of what freedom could mean. That's not liberal at all. That's really about establishing a male headed household in Bahia in which they could feel prosperous and embedded in a broader African community. And so, yeah, and I was thinking about, I'm about to teach my survey of emancipation in the Atlantic world. And I think one of the things I come to at the end of it or try to show the students is that, you know, the 19th century, the long 19th century is really about how different visions of black liberation are kind of really demobilized or stymied. And that you have one vision that kind of emerges. And then as historians, we think, oh, that's always what they were trying to do. They were always just trying to get to sort of liberal democratic, you know, freedom. Right. But there are all these other like side projects that don't make sense in that kind of teleology. And, and you know, alternatives to, to liberal democratic freedom are, are swept aside oftentimes, you know, in many of these post slavery societies. And I'm writing about a period before the emancipation of slavery, but I mean, you already see that enslaved people aren't necessarily all invested in, in a notion of liberal freedom.
- [57:20]
Adam McNeil
Yeah. And, and that's, that's why I think your work is really awesome because among many reasons, but because it helps show your reader about different ideas. Right. For example, like now, even we certainly, we need alternatives in certain ways because every, every damn place, you see democracy everywhere. And like the contemporary sense, especially our uva, Lord have mercy. Democracy, democracy, democracy. You even literally have like, democracy, like readings in the, like the bookstore, like at that level of, like, you know, you know, organization. But I think, you know, as we finish up here, I think to your point, that black people have, you know, as then and now, have different conceptions of what freedom and also ideas of what they actually want. Take freedom out of. What do you actually want out of life? And to say, like, what are people willing to do? And even like their interactions with these imperial officials about what folks are willing to do to over overhaul their lives, that might in our more contemporary sense, seem a bit unnerving. It's like, why, why, why you want to do that? You were just taken captive, innately alienated. Now you want to do that. You know what I'm saying? But that is the differences of, of life and situations that I think your work certainly complicates in the sense of how, you know, the age of revolutions is happening. But we're also talking about this particular world of South Atlantic slavery that black mariners are integral to in many different ways. And so we've come to our final question here, and it's thinking about, you know, the book is out now, right? It's out to the world. People are reading it. People are, you know, I'm sure there's a review that's. Or two that people are being asked to do because now we're at that stage. But now with you, Mary, as the author of this book, and, you know, you're, you know, working on different things maybe, or even just recovering honestly, maybe even as well, because the dissertation is hard as hell to do. So I can't even imagine what a book is. Lord have mercy. I got time. I got time. I got time. But with that being said, what do you hope readers of Captive Cosmopolitans take away from the men, interesting and complicated in certain ways that you've devoted so much of your life to writing about. What do you hope your readers take away from your book?
- [60:01]
Mary E. Hicks
Yeah, so I think that there's intellectually what we hope people will take away, and then also maybe sort of humanistically, spiritually, you know, we hope people take away. So I very much see myself writing in a humanist tradition and maybe even more specifically like a black humanist tradition in the sense that I think relating people's life stories and the kinds of challenges and conundrums that they faced is really powerful. You Know, just to connect to that and to read about people's lives. You know, I have stories of men running away from slavery, others running or going back to slavery in Bahia after they've been freed by the British. Some people decide to completely leave the transatlantic slave trade once they are able to become freedmen themselves. Others, you know, continue on as merchants trafficking other goods from Africa. So there's so many different life trajectories covered in this book. There are also some women. I should also mention that the wives of these men also come up in the later chapters because they are able to establish households, they have children. You know, their wives, in some respects, are their business partners as they're selling these West African goods in Bahia. And so I hope people can connect to these people on a human level intellectually. I think that I would say my great aspiration for the book. I don't know if I get there, but is to reveal something, I think, about the making of the modern world through the lens of these men's lives. And I think that, you know, we have to understand the modern world as being a place of paradox, a place of, you know, real violence, right. Colonialism, merchant capitalism. Those are violent processes. And so, you know, it's the kind of creative destruction that, you know, some capitalists talk about in a positive way in the contemporary world. But I would say, like, this is real creative destruction, you know, that. That harmed people's lives and created many tragic circumstances. But that black people were part of that, right. That they were really in the center of this process of modernization, and that they had to remake themselves over and over again. Right. In order to survive that world, they had to learn new languages. They had to learn new ways of being in the world. They had to learn new occupational skills, as you mentioned early in the interview, and that they attempted to exert their own influence on the world, Right. They created their own communities. They created their own ways of thinking about the body. They created their own ways of creating spiritual communities. And so, you know, it's a story about violence, but I think it's also a story about African people's ingenuity in the face of, you know, the violence of modernity. Yeah, so I like. Yeah, so it's a narrative about early modern period. How do we get to this modern world? And that black people are center in the center of it.
- [63:03]
Adam McNeil
Wonderful. And so, Mary, thank you so much for being at the center of our conversation today and the actors that you've devoted your life in this timeframe to discussing and analyzing and bringing to our attention. But then also this conversation is also why you have so many prominent blurbs on here. This conversation in this amazing book is why James Sidbury of Rice University says Hicks retells the story of Atlantic commerce from a radically new perspective. Enslaved and free Africans who participated in the slave trade that linked Brazil to West Africa. She reveals how black sailors, petty traders, and healers in this maritime world charted myriad paths through bondage, shaping South Atlantic cultures and economies of playing crucial roles in the development of the modern world. But, hey, this book is so good, they not only have one, they have three. So let me read one more. And this is from Michelle McKinley from the University of Oregon School of Law. McKinley says captive cosmopolitans is meticulously researched. Theoretically bold and innovative and beautifully written. Hicks explores the black maritime world of the men and women involved in the South Atlantic slave trade, handling the questions of black people's investment in slavery with care and complexity. End quote. And so, Mary, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, thank you so much for sitting down with me on New Books in African American Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. And I'm just so happy that we had the chance to finally, you know, connect again. And I certainly hope that our paths cross again. So I have my book in hand because you. You might not know this, but I definitely want. I want you to sign my. My copy. I need. I need a signature, right? I need you.
- [65:06]
Mary E. Hicks
Are you gonna sign. Are you gonna sign your book when it comes out for me, too?
- [65:10]
Adam McNeil
Of course. It's. It's done. It's done, right? You wanna know why it's done? Because literally the whole world's listening right now. So I, you know, we both. We both have to do it.
- [65:20]
Mary E. Hicks
Can't go back on it now.
- [65:22]
Adam McNeil
Not at all. Not at all. So thank you again, Mary, for sitting down with me again. And to all y' all listening, please like and subscribe to New Books in African American Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Until next time, y', all, Adam McNeil, host of new books and FM studies, over and out.