Pharmaceutical Captivity, Epistemological Rupture, and the Business Archive of the British Slave Trade

Abstract

The archival record of the transatlantic slave trade poses a methodological challenge to researchers who wish to center the lives of enslaved people in their scholarship. In more recent years, such archival scrutiny has evolved into its own vibrant field of inquiry concerning the politics of the archive. This article contributes to this burgeoning field by studying the pharmaceutical dimensions of the British slave trade and examining the underexplored relationship between captivity and drugs that articulated across the Atlantic world. By performing three different readings of a slave ship drug invoice—as a textual artifact, epistemic argument, and narrative of loss—I argue that the drug invoice stimulates new illness narratives of captive Africans in the historiography of the British slave trade.