Poisoned Relations - (Early Modern Americas) by Chelsea Berry (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered "weapon of the weak" while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events.

In Poisoned Relations, Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one's relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved--they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities.

Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts--British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas--bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences.

Review Quotes

"In this groundbreaking, deeply researched, and highly readable book, Chelsea Berry shows how ideas about poison in the slave societies of the Atlantic world were far more complex and contested than previously thought. Berry's ingenious use of comparative linguistics shows how poisons stood at the nexus of both new ideas about health and healing and the resistance to and assertion of power. The result is a masterful study which marks an important contribution to our understandings of early modern medicine, power, and diasporic African thought in the Atlantic world."-- "Benjamin Breen, University of California Santa Cruz"

About the Author

Chelsea Berry is Upper School History Teacher in the Department of History and Social Sciences at Holton-Arms School.