Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic.

AuthorMonroe, Kimberly F.

Morgan, Jennifer L. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Duke University Press, 2021. xvi + 296 pp..

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, by historian Jennifer L. Morgan introduces readers to the intersectional relationship of gender, kinship, and capitalism by diving into the economic and numerical logics of representations justified by slavery. Within the text, she demonstrates how the study and scholarship of slavery caused an erasure to violence, particularly for women, while enforcing hierarchies and policies of social relations. Morgan challenges historians and scholars to evolve from writing about enslavement merely as numerical, to writing directly from an intellectual, social and familial viewpoint.

The work provides new perspectives into race, gender, and capital beginning with the enslavement of African women. Opening with a narrative of Elizabeth Keye, daughter of an enslaved African women and free white Englishman, she describes the various identities of kinship while being born during seventeenth century colony of Virginia. Opening with Keye's story helps to frame the intersectional and interdisciplinary facets of the book.

Part I examines the quantity of enslaved women and girls who were transported prior to 1700. In the next few chapters, Morgan focuses on early Modern European writers and disciplines created out of misconceptions about Africans. Chapters 3: "To Their Great Commoditie" engages in European obsession with numerical rationality and slave records in which Morgan points out leads to African captives becoming commodities. Part II specifically focuses on enslaved women and the geographical spaces across English America, Dutch New York, and Caribbean colonies. Chapters 4 discusses the Middle Passage, beginning with the narratives of the first enslaved women taken from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. Framing the examination of the Middle Passage through the narratives of female captives, allows readers to ask questions related to identities, such as motherhood, and how women were treated inversely.

A critical point that Morgan pushes is that numbers are not important. What is vital to this history is the actual lives and agency of women. For instance, Chapter 6: "'Treacherous Rogues:' Locating Women in Resistance and Revolt" is a reminder of what Morgan calls the "question of refusal" to think through the understanding the...

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