New Books Network: Interview with Mary E. Hicks

Episode: "Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery"

Host: Adam McNeil
Guest: Mary E. Hicks, Associate Professor of History, University of Chicago
Date: September 26, 2025

Episode Overview

In this richly insightful episode of the New Books Network, Adam McNeil interviews historian Mary E. Hicks about her groundbreaking book Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2025). The conversation explores the history and significance of Black mariners in the South Atlantic slave trade, unraveling their roles as workers, cultural mediators, and legal actors across Africa, Brazil, and Europe. Hicks details her research journey, her analytical frameworks, and the vital historiographical debates her book engages—redefining how we understand mobility, cosmopolitanism, and freedom in Atlantic slavery.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Genesis of the Project and Research Pivot (03:22)

• Mary E. Hicks shares that her research began with a focus on enslaved African women in Brazil.
  • Early archival roadblocks forced her to pivot, as critical documents were unavailable.
  • Hicks was drawn by recurring images of Black people by the sea in major slavery studies and decided to follow this thread.
  • A pivotal moment: discovering a 1797 Lisbon petition by four enslaved sailors claiming their "natural liberty." The sophistication and cosmopolitanism in their language redirected her research.
• Quote:
  “I found a petition written by four enslaved sailors for their freedom in 1797... the sophistication, the cosmopolitanism of their language and their rhetoric really intrigued me.” (04:07, Hicks)

2. Defining 'Cosmopolitanism' Among Captives (12:01)

• Discussion focuses on how cosmopolitanism—traditionally a Eurocentric term—takes on new meaning within slave societies.
  • Black mariners navigated multiple languages, cultures, and legal systems, which was both a tool of survival and exploitation.
  • Hicks contrasts celebratory understandings of cosmopolitanism with its realities under coercion, violence, and enslavement.
• Quote:
  "Their seamless movement through vast oceanic environments was mirrored in their metaphorical boundary crossing… Their protean subjectivities, forged between Africa and Brazil, enriched and empowered a handful of slaving merchants and slave owners on land." (09:45, Hicks - reading from the book)
• Quote:
  “They are traveling sometimes, like thousands of miles in their lifetime... 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.” (13:15, Hicks)

3. Historiographical Stakes and Interventions (22:40)

• Hicks positions her work within and against the ideas of scholars like Ira Berlin (Atlantic Creole), Rashauna Johnson, and others.
  • She critiques the tendency to abstract or romanticize creolization/cosmopolitanism and underscores the persistent violence and material realities shaping mariners’ lives.
  • The book emphasizes spatial logics of slavery, aquatic mobility, and the inventive adaptability of enslaved people.
• Quote:
  “Slavery—early modern slavery—has a kind of spatial logic to it ... compulsed movement is just as important into making what a slave can be as sequestered movement.” (24:03, Hicks)
  • She hopes her work speaks to current debates in Black geographies and legal histories of slavery.

4. Transforming Legal Boundaries and Religious Life (25:18 & 29:24)

• Hicks describes how Black mariners helped reshape Portuguese laws about slavery (e.g., repurposing free soil statutes for liberation).
• She traces the emergence of Afro-Brazilian religious practice (Condomblé) to the material and spiritual circulations made possible by these mariners.

5. Research Evolution: From Dissertation to Book (29:24)

• Hicks credits her interdisciplinary training at UVA and Amherst, highlighting the transformative impact of engaging with both Africanist and Brazilianist scholarship.
• She details how conversations with Africanist scholars deepened her analyses of healers, material culture, and paraarchives (redefining what counts as historical evidence for enslaved consciousness).

6. South Atlantic versus North Atlantic Slavery (36:43)

• The South Atlantic had vastly higher proportions of African-born and enslaved mariners than the North Atlantic slave trade.
  • Whereas North Atlantic seafarers were often free, South Atlantic crews might be up to 80% African or of African descent, shaping shipboard culture, labor, and resistance.
  • Maritime spaces in Brazil became crucibles of Black culture, fraternity, and sometimes unusually fluid interracial interactions.

7. Skills and Social Reproduction at Sea (43:41)

• Host Adam McNeil asks how captives acquired maritime skills. Hicks explains:
  • There was a colonial presumption of Africans’ aquatic skills.
  • Adolescents, in particular, were preferred and trained as maritime apprentices.
  • Mariners held roles from common sailors to medical practitioners, with experiential (on-the-job) transmission of knowledge paramount.
• Quote:
  “As soon as Europeans are arriving in West Africa, ... they are highlighting, like, oh, these people, these Africans are preternaturally good swimmers… 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.” (43:41, Hicks)

8. Rethinking Complicity, Freedom, and the Age of Revolutions (52:13)

• Hicks problematizes the notion that Black mariners simply mirrored North Atlantic (abolitionist, liberal) visions of freedom.
  • Their visions were pragmatic: often pursuing manumission, social standing, and household establishment over universal emancipation.
  • This complicates the teleological narrative of progress toward democratic freedoms in the Age of Revolutions.
• Quote:
  “They crafted 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." (54:45, Hicks)
  • Her work, echoing Jessica Marie Johnson, underscores plurality in Black visions of liberty and community.

9. What Hicks Hopes Readers Will Take Away (60:01)

• Intellectually, Hicks wants her book to center Black mariners as architects of the modern world, shaping and being shaped by capitalism, colonialism, and ongoing violence.
• Humanistically, she aims for readers to connect to the life stories, ingenuity, and agency of these men and their families.
• Quote:
  “They had to remake themselves over and over again… to survive that world. They attempted to exert their own influence… They created their own communities… ways of thinking about the body… spiritual communities. So it's a story about violence, but I think it's also a story about African people's ingenuity in the face of the violence of modernity.” (61:00, Hicks)

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Research Origins:
  “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…” (03:40, Hicks)

• On Law and Agency:
  “These men were claiming that because they had set foot on Portuguese soil... they should be free... The sophistication, the cosmopolitanism of their language and their rhetoric really intrigued me.” (04:25, Hicks)

• On Historiographical Ambition:
  “We have to really be attentive to these material processes and how we think about, you know, social relations and culture.” (19:00, Hicks)

• On Difference in Slaveries:
  “In the North Atlantic, seamen are mostly contract laborers. ... In the South Atlantic, because these men are enslaved... they're not free contract laborers. ... They're also bringing these remnants of African culture aboard.” (38:00, Hicks)

• On Alternative Freedoms:
  “Freedom is more than just a legal status and there's all these different ways of imagining what, what freedom meant… And for some it doesn't mean the kind of universal end of slavery.” (53:45, Hicks)

• On Humanist Intent:
  “I think relating people's life stories and the kinds of challenges and conundrums that they faced is really powerful... my great aspiration... is to reveal something about the making of the modern world through the lens of these men's lives.” (60:01, Hicks)

Timestamps for Major Segments

• 03:22 – Project origin and research pivot: from enslaved women to Black mariners.
• 09:45 – Hicks reads from her introduction: Black mariners as boundary-crossers, cosmopolitanism defined.
• 13:15 – Defining cosmopolitanism in the Atlantic world.
• 18:45 – Historiographical stakes and the critique of Atlantic Creole.
• 22:40 – Key debates: law, mobility, culture, and African influences.
• 29:24 – Evolution from dissertation to book; deepening interdisciplinary engagement.
• 36:43 – South Atlantic versus North Atlantic slavery: Demographics and labor.
• 43:41 – Skills acquisition and the making of “seafarers.”
• 52:13 – Complicity, the Age of Revolutions, and multiple visions of freedom.
• 60:01 – What Hicks wants readers to take away: Humanism and world-making.

Concluding Reflections and Endorsements

• Host Adam McNeil closes with praise from prominent scholars (James Sidbury, Michelle McKinley) lauding Captive Cosmopolitans’ methodological innovation and theoretical rigor.
• The episode ends with warm acknowledgments and mutual promises of signing each other’s books—a testament to the camaraderie in the scholarly community.

Listen to this episode for a transformative deep dive into the world of Black mariners, their cosmopolitan creativity, and their centrality in the making of the South Atlantic—and the modern world.