This article examines how English and West African agents involved in the slave trade in Atlantic Africa used animals to establish trust, forge political bonds, connect distant spaces through a shared medium of exchange, and create regular trading networks from the late seventeenth century until the early eighteenth century. Slave traders from the Royal African Company and diverse West African polities offered each other livestock for sacrifice or as diplomatic gifts to formalise political or commercial alliances. Traders used the shells of cowry sea snails as abstract currency to purchase captives. These exchanges gradually produced and constituted an ecocultural network of human and animal social relationships and cross-cultural negotiations that enabled the expansion of England's involvement in the slave trade from the Gambia River to the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin. However, vermin animals impeded these connections by destroying valuable commodities, including trade goods and human captives. This article aims to deepen our understanding of how animals bound European and African slave traders together into new networks of exchange, and how some animals threatened the stability of their partnerships.
This article examines the medical career of an enslaved physician in Virginia named Nassaw from the mid eighteenth-century until the period of the American Revolution. I develop a taxonomy of Nassaw’s labours as a nurse caring for the sick, a healer administering medicines at the behest of his enslaver and as a doctor in his own right making medical judgements as he treated his patients. Nassaw is in some ways comparable to other enslaved healers of African descent in the Atlantic world, including well-known Mohanes and ritual specialists in Brazil and Latin America. However, due to his role as a physician employed by his slaveholder to principally heal other enslaved people, Nassaw struggled to find satisfaction in his labours as a healer as other enslaved people rightly perceived him as an agent of their enslaver whose medical work healed their bodies while extending their oppression. I argue that Nassaw became frustrated and depressed, and turned to drinking because of his inability to pursue or experience what Sharla M. Fett terms a ‘relational vision of health’ in the Chesapeake. Moreover, I interpret his drinking as a rebuke to the racist pretensions of his enslaver – who instructed him in pharmacy and surgery – who aimed to transform Nassaw into an Enlightened ‘black exhibit’ by training him to be a doctor. I conclude by returning to how precisely different Nassaw was from other enslaved healers in the Chesapeake like Tom of Nomini Hall or Romeo, and make the case that Nassaw deserves a place in histories of slavery and medicine precisely because he was an enslaved plantation doctor rather than a popular healer or conjuror.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.