African Kings and Black Slaves

Herman L. Bennett is Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is author of Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico and Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640.

"At the core of Bennett's book is the argument that the fierce competition between Portugal and Spain over the African Atlantic, which was significantly mediated by the Church, was crucial to the creation of the modern nation-state and of what became modern European nationalism. Early national identities in Europe were forged, to a substantial extent, on the basis of competition over trade and influence in Africa. And this, Bennett says, gets completely lost in Western histories that fast-forward from the conquest of the Canary Islands to Columbus's arrival in the Americas." (New York Review of Books) "Bennett engages a wide historiography and offers new perspectives on early Atlantic legal culture, political and religious authority, pageantry, and slavery. Bennett complicates the narrative that Europeans rendered Africans into property and capital through Roman law and Christian theology . . . .African Kings and Black Slaves is one of the boldest and most successful attempts yet to engage the fields of African studies, history, and critical theory equally." (Hispanic American Historical Review) "African Kings and Black Slaves is an impressive work that fundamentally challenges current understandings of slavery, empire and modernity, and will likely be the cornerstone of a new body of scholarship it invites." (Bulletin of Spanish Studies) "The book is short but packed with Bennett's analyses of the work of previous and current theorists and scholars. His judgments are acute, and . . . [h]e examines a prodigious amount of theory, using those parts of the corpus and the arguments that are pertinent and demolishing those he deems mistaken or misleading . . . The book is a major accomplishment and a testament to Bennett's wide reading. All those working on Atlantic slavery will need to take it into account." (Renaissance Quarterly) "Herman L. Bennett's African Kings and Black Slaves is a prelude to an essential contribution to Anglo-American studies of slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world. It is a tour de force historiographical essay. The ideological aims underpinning Bennett's work are rather astute. Bennett offers an incendiary understanding of the 1441 Afro-European contacts against the existing historiography about the Atlantic slave trade." (Black Perspectives) "African Kings and Black Slavesconstitutes an impressive reframing of the origins of African and European sovereignty, absolutism, trade, and the legal and economic underpinnings of slaving and the African diaspora...Bennett's book is immensely valuable due to his insistence on historicizing fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuryAfrican-Europeanencounters without the totalizing frame of an always already powerful Europe." (H-Altlantic) "An immensely thought-provoking book. In his sophisticated reconsideration of late-medieval European characterizations of sub-Saharan Africans, Herman L. Bennett troubles the traditional account of the rise of the West." (David Wheat, Michigan State University) "Herman L. Bennett's indispensable study alerts us to the political and intellectual consequences of flattening the history of Europe's relations with Africa by overlooking the Iberian experience. He ably shows how recuperating the notion of African sovereignty, abundantly recognized in early exchanges, can fundamentally change our understanding of African polities and African subjects." (Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles) "African Kings and Black Slaves centers the histories of peoples of African descent in the grand tale of imperial conquest and power and thereby challenges the dominant narrative that colonial slavery has timelessly been about freedom. Herman Bennett is especially sensitive to the multisited nature of the contests set in motion by colonial encounters." (Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

• PrologueChapter 1. LiberalismChapter 2. MythologiesChapter 3. LawChapter 4. AuthorityChapter 5. HistoriesChapter 6. TradeEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments