African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic

Abstract

Herman Bennett's African Kings and Black Slaves challenges the liberal philosophy that he argues has come to define historiography on the African continent and the enslavement of African peoples. In so doing, he shifts the focus of analysis to the role of absolutist states in the enslavement of African peoples. Histories of African slavery in general “have been rendered as a singular phenomenon mediated through liberalism's nineteenth-century prism” (154). As such, connected perceptions of the jointly shared African-European past have been left largely unwritten, with the author arguing that it is “for this reason, deconstructing Europe's epistemological hegemony still represents a precondition for inscribing the story of Africa and Africans” (80).The first chapter sets out his case against the representation of early modern Africa through the lens of eighteenth-century British and French liberalism. The second identifies the mythologies of power involved in fifteenth-century African-European encounters. The third chapter considers the role of legal taxonomies in the creation of a jurisprudential framework within which to situate the extra ecclesiam. The fourth challenges specifically what Bennett argues is a widespread misinterpretation of the papal bull Romanus Pontifex, which in Bennett's reading merely granted a monopoly of trade, not dominion over non-Christian polities. The fifth chapter demonstrates Iberian acknowledgment of African sovereignty within travel narratives and the vociferous debate over canon law between followers of Hostiensis and Innocent IV. It is in this chapter that Bennett's powerful analysis of well-thumbed sources comes to the fore, offering a new reading of the histories of Portuguese and Castilian negotiation with Guinean lords. The final chapter identifies the role of absolutism and statehood within the processes of enslavement and the trade in human lives.Pope Innocent IV's interpretation of natural law, civil law, and divine law recognized the extra ecclesiam as rational and therefore human, acknowledging a fundamental freedom with regard to religious and political practices (54–55). By couching his analysis within this legal discourse, Bennett shifts the focus from chattel theory to the logics of political power in absolutism, tyranny, and despotism, bound to the processes of enslavement. Catholic presence in Guinea was justified via the rhetoric of universal evangelization and Catholic involvement in the trade in human lives by the fact that the church was distanced from the process of enslavement itself. The work is an excavation of a complex political context of interaction between religious, legal, and state jurisdictions that preceded the market-oriented interpretations of individuals as chattel.Rather than seeking terra nullius to colonize or raid, early Iberian travelers and colonists were avidly searching for African kings with whom to establish trade relations. In this way, Catholic lords could disavow any knowledge of the illegality of the process of enslavement in multiple locations. Populations that provided no opportunity to trade, Bennett argues, did not feature within the Europeans' index of civility (113). By focusing on the efforts of expansionist polities that preceded the British, Dutch, and French, Bennett presents a case for the consideration of Portuguese and Castilian thought within the larger body of histories on European state and imperial philosophy. He also points to the important notion that Iberian expansion was only possible via the consideration of Guinean power, further complicating historiographical constructions that reduce European interactions with Africans to concepts of alterity and commerce. In taking this approach, he sheds light on the processes and subjectivities that preceded totalizing interpretations of Africans as “objects.”By focusing his analysis on Iberian manifestations of the absolutist Catholic state and colonizing practices, he problematizes the ahistorical time frame common to most studies of chattel slavery that focus on eighteenth-century constructions of individualism and economy. In so doing, he reinterprets a body of canon sources, travel narratives, and charters that depict a very political European engagement with African sovereignty. What ensues is predicated on an exegesis of the mechanisms of control and regulation of people by absolutist rulers rather than the metabolization of territory and resources by liberal capitalists. Empty territory was worthless in Iberian roteiros. These travelers were searching for senhorios in whom the authority and facilitation of trading partnerships was manifest.The work ranges between heavy critique of Enlightenment discourse, such as capitalist economics, and close analysis of medieval European sources. Bennett's source base is well-known with many of the documents available in translation, perhaps a reason for the balance of the work swinging toward historiographical iconoclasm. Chapter 4, for example, has several pages dedicated to the interrogation of a section of the RomanusPontifex (84–86), but the remainder of the twenty-six-page chapter relies solely on problematizing ahistorical readings of early modern processes through manifestations of Enlightenment thought and modern constructions of Africans and Africa.That said, this chapter on authority and the final chapter on trade are remarkable contributions to theories of state, as the author argues the role of universal religious and intellectual trajectories, such as evangelical Catholicism and state absolutism, in the regulation of people, which includes the enslavement of those deemed to exist without sovereignty. By focusing on the institution of slavery as an economic trope, modern sensibilities have neglected the link between enslavement and dominion, and therefore politics (145). This work is an example of, and rationale for, a much-needed approach to the study of African and European perspectives on political, religious, and cultural interrelations between polities in Europe, Africa, and the diaspora communities of the Atlantic as it unsettles the monuments and padrões of hegemonic historical narratives.Bennett moves a number of debates on early modern processes such as Catholic state formation, conversion, slavery, and entangled Atlantic histories toward a place in which African and Iberian histories are given their due (interconnected) place in the development of early modern understandings of statecraft and governance but also abject violence and the trade in human lives.