Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World by Christopher Michael Blakley (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World by Christopher Michael Blakley
• Rachael L. Pasierowska

Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World. By Christopher Michael Blakley. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xiii, 236. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7886-7.)

Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World marks a refreshing watershed in the historiography of slavery. [End Page 600] Christopher Michael Blakley has penned the first full-length book that centers enslaved persons and slaveholders in the world of fauna and the transatlantic slave trade. Historians of both slavery and animals will find a rich study that covers differing geographical scales across West Africa and throughout the British Atlantic world in the 1700s. Blakley’s overarching argument focuses on the various ways white slaveholders intentionally attempted to strip enslaved Black persons of their humanity. The author further contends that such attempts were often futile because enslaved persons refused such treatment and that, instead, “they dared to imagine a world that recognized and reckoned with Black humanity in its fullness” (p. 150).

His chapters follow an approach similar to many Atlantic slavery studies, beginning in Africa and then moving to the British Caribbean and North America, with their primary focus on the eighteenth-century British slave societies. The extensive archival research draws from an extensive wealth of sources, including advertisements for runaway enslaved persons, diaries, essays, inventories, letters, newspapers, plantation manuals, portraits, and the Royal African Company’s records, to demonstrate how colonial slaveholders held similar “racial attitudes among Europeans who equated people of African descent and livestock” (p. 89).

While the author states that the study’s primary focus is on white attitudes toward Black people, there already exists an extensive historiography on travel narratives from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regarding scientific racism. Where Blakley’s study enhances this literature is through an analysis of Africans’ knowledge of the animal world and how they utilized such information through the variables of trade. One interesting example is the employment of cowrie shells (from small mollusks) as currency between sub-Saharan Africans and European merchants. These shells, upon which the Royal African Company pinioned much of its transactions with African trading partners, illustrate African agency in crafting relationships between slavery and animals along the West African littoral. In this vein, chapters 4 and 5 are Blakley’s strongest, detailing how enslaved persons demonstrated autonomy against the system of slavery through interactions with fauna. In the Americas, white colonists’ continued efforts at dehumanization led to instances of enslaved persons neglecting, killing, and consuming their owners’ animals. Other enslaved people purloined horses to put a greater distance between themselves and enforced bondage, either by running away completely or simply traveling to see wives and other beloved family members.

In an otherwise excellent study, the author does have the occasional dismissive statement. In one particular instance, he states that “no serious scholar could claim that . . . enslaved people ever believed themselves to be animals” (pp. 15–16). This overlooks the complex experiences of enslaved children, especially in the early years of infant psychological development. There are many sources attesting to how slaveholders treated enslaved children as animals, such as tying up infants by their legs and leaving them in cages during long working days. Slaveholding women, in particular, had a tendency to “foster” enslaved children away from a parent’s guidance. While this field of research is still underdeveloped, Blakley’s statement undermines the arguments of academics researching enslaved children’s psychosomatic growth in [End Page 601] the context of human-animal studies. By looking into scholarship on enslaved children, Blakley would have been better positioned to explore the role of enslaved parents and their wider community in instilling an identity that defied white slaveholders’ theories of animalistic nature in such young minds.

In closing, Empire of Brutality will have a strong influence on human-animal studies and paves the way in this exciting field for scholars of enslaved persons and their rich relations with fauna in the transatlantic world.

Rachael L. Pasierowska Lincoln University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...