Katherine Johnston, "The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World" (Oxford UP, 2022)

New Books in African American Studies · Apr 3, 2023 · 1h 2m

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Oxford UP, 2022) interrogates how people with an interest in African slavery manufactured and publicly disseminated a baseless rhetoric about climate, race, and labor that they knew, privately, to contradict their lived experiences. In the late eighteenth century, plantation owners and slaveholders in the Caribbean and the American South publicly argued that physiological and biological differences made African people more capable of withstanding the heat and labor required to work on plantations. This…