Reckoning with Slavery

“Jennifer L. Morgan examines the transition to racialized slavery in the early modern Atlantic world with innovative research methods and original analysis. She brilliantly accounts for the emergence of an unholy alliance between a novel proficiency with numbers and the hierarchical classification of human difference, which helped to make kinship into a commodity. This is essential reading for anyone who wonders how black humanity ceased to matter to some, and why centuries later we must still proclaim the worth of black lives.” — Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

“Jennifer L. Morgan makes an original, innovative, and creative intervention in the study of race and gender that establishes the groundwork necessary for revising our knowledge of the systems of trade and the commodification of peoples in the nineteenth century. Reckoning with Slavery is essential reading for anyone in the social sciences and the humanities who wants to understand the formation of the modern world. A major work.” — Hazel V. Carby, author of Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands