Mathelinda Nabugodi traces the shifts in Coleridge’s thoughts on race from his early abolitionist writings to his later reflections on beauty and aesthetics. Focusing on his comments about Africans, Nabugodi demonstrates a crucial tension between the Romantic poet’s youthful commitment to abolition and the embrace of scientific racism in his later writings. This tension also informs the revisions that Coleridge made to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) when he prepared it for republication in Sibylline Leaves (1817). Nabugodi’s careful comparative reading of the 1798 and the 1817 versions highlights the way a representative poet’s work embodies the contradictions of a Romanticism in which freedom could be imagined as universal even as European superiority was taken for granted.

Chapter 4 examines Veracruz’s role as a hub of the transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on archival manuscripts held in Mexico and not previously used in studies of the slave trade, it offers a detailed examination of the slave trade to Mexico in three chronological stages: an early period (before 1595); the asiento period (1595–1640); and a decline period (1640–1713). In its examination of both the early and later stages of the slave trade, the chapter departs from earlier studies that focus mainly on the Portuguese asiento period, showing that more captives arrived in Veracruz in the early and decline periods than has been acknowledged and those who did hailed disproportionately from West Africa, rather than West Central Africa. Across all periods, the chapter demonstrates the complexity of the early modern slave trade to the Spanish Caribbean, focusing especially on the intercolonial slave trade and on nonlinear slave ship voyages that delivered captives in multiple colonies. In this, it argues that we should not think of captives who arrived in Mexico as a distinct “cohort,” but as part of a regionwide diaspora to multiple Caribbean territories.

This chapter examines three leather letter cases, small, plain personal objects, similar to men’s wallets, the significance of which has been previously overlooked in museum collections. Despite their limited embellishments, small size, and low-status material, these letter cases prove to be extremely effective in providing us with insights into some of the key social and economic developments of the eighteenth century. The cases, through the biographies of their owners, provide tangible links to several aspects of eighteenth-century commerce: the transatlantic slave trade; the growth of the mercantile elite and their commercial networks within the consumer revolution; and the development of manufacturing and retail networks in English towns. Comparing the cases’ material details and composition with other extant examples, this chapter places them within the context of contemporary print culture, including the appearance of cases on trade cards, in novels, criminal trials, and accounts of slave trade voyages. These letter cases were acquired and carried by their owners not just as a means of transporting bills of exchange, letters, and sometimes notebooks, but also as a way of establishing and signaling to contemporaries mercantile-class identity and rising social status.

In her chapter, Thomas reads pre-1800 legal writings about people of African descent as Black life writing. She expands autobiographical writing beyond an account of an individual’s growth and development in cases of people of African descent to narratives regarding Black people as active agents forming an embodied community racialized and marginalized by the dominant culture. Thomas argues that Black writers published autobiographical writings and also wove personal narratives into legal documents from fidavits to freedom petitions, as well as into traditional literary forms such as poems and letters. However, during the same colonial and early American eras, people of European descent inscribed details about Black peoples in a variety of historical records such as the census, bills of sale, antislavery pamphlets, court records, and runaway slave advertisements to accentuate their differences from and inability to assimilate into the majority culture.

Reading Caribbean autobiography as a space of difference, Aljoe’s chapter aims not to emphasize rigid separation, but rather to highlight the vibrant complexity of life writing discourses throughout global African diasporas, as well as to contribute to articulations of the myriad ways in which Black lives have been represented across the globe. Aljoe elaborates on some of the ways in which Afro-Caribbean life writing can be considered a distinct tradition within a broader tradition of transatlantic African diasporic writing. Her goal is to illuminate three key issues that distinguish Afro-Caribbean life writing: the importance of attending to mediated slave narratives within larger traditions of life writing, engagements with the imbrication of notions of national and individual sovereignty, and finally, articulation of that which is grounded in the inherently Creole culture of the Caribbean.

Lamore examines revisions found in the full-length and abridged editions of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative published in the United States, and contends that they serve as a type of textual signature; they record how the editor and/or book publisher revised the autobiography to appeal to different readers in the United States. The US publishing history of Equiano's Narrative demonstrates that whereas the publishing history of the authorized editions of the autobiography underscores Equiano’s successful attempts to control his life, text, and self, the publishing history of the US editions of the autobiography repeatedly reveals that his life, text, and self were edited by others. For Lamore, the editing of an autobiographical text by a non-authorial agent forms an essential part of its reception history and the history of the multiple actors present in published life narratives. The publishing history of A Narrative of the Lord’s Most Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a frequently read eighteenth-century autobiography related by a free person of African descent, provides another occasion to study unauthorized editions of transatlantic autobiography.

Drawing on rare customs records, ship manifests, travelers’ accounts, periodicals, and other primary documents, this chapter places Salvador as an Atlantic hub for the consumption and distribution of African products—especially palm oil. Along with colorful textiles, peppers, kola nuts, and other African imports, African palm oil helped materialize the various Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions developing among Bahia’s growing Afro-descendant majority. That urban market for palm oil imported from Africa contrasted in some ways with the rural networks of domestically produced oil, yet as this chapter lays out, those markets developed in complement, rather than competition. This chapter demonstrates how “legitimate” palm oil trades served to reinforce, rather than replace, the transatlantic slave economy through its “clandestine” period in the mid-nineteenth century. Analyzing these various trades collectively and as they intersected in Bahia, this chapter details how exchanges of goods and ideas energized Afro-Brazilian cultures and economies, led to the expansion of palm oil landscapes in both western Africa and Bahia, and helped to assemble and invigorate an Atlantic World.

Through a close reading of primary and rare historical sources, this chapter demonstrates how diverse communities transferred, adapted, and blended botanical species and knowledges to forge innovative “Creole” landscapes and societies in Brazil and beyond. It places the African oil palm within Atlantic networks of botanical and intellectual exchange to examine its arrival and establishment in Bahia. The chapter concludes by discussing the roles of Afro-descendant people and ecologies within palm oil landscapes and cultures in Brazil.

Weaving primary accounts with botanical and ecological analyses, this chapter demonstrates how oil palm cultures, landscapes, and commerce emerged in western Africa and eventually helped to integrate an Atlantic World. It details human-oil palm relationships in West and Central Africa over the previous five thousand years, and applies complexity sciences to understand the formation and proliferation of biodiverse palm groves permeating human communities and secondary forests. It places palm oil and kernels as early goods of trade on the inter-biome routes and later with European ships journeying down African coasts, and describes how palm oil supported the transatlantic slave trade as both provision and medicine. It culminates by charting the oil palm’s diffusion throughout the Caribbean and the mainland American Tropics during European colonial expansion. Charting the longue durée of African oil palms and their transatlantic diffusion, this chapter reveals how a promising model of human-environmental collaboration and ingenuity became subsumed in the transatlantic slave economy and its horrendous crimes against humanity.

This chapter argues that the policy developed for evangelizing black populations in Spanish America, compared with that of indigenous populations in the same regions, required uniquely validating black interpreters’ roles as evangelical intermediaries. This validation in turn opened a space for important forms of subjectification and authority for black interpreters.

This chapter considers the transatlantic influences that shaped Irish literary culture in the romantic period. In particular, it focuses on two understudied phenomena. First, the chapter provides an account of texts published in Ireland that concern African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, written by pro-slavery sympathisers, white abolitionists, and writers of African descent like Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. Second, it zeroes in on a forgotten Irish novel, Sarah Isdell’s The Vale of Louisiana, published in Dublin in 1805, which dramatises the transatlantic, trans-Caribbean travels of an English family, addresses slavery directly, and borrows heavily from a canonical early American novel, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798). The chapter concludes on the other side of the ‘steep Atlantic’, as Sydney Owenson called it, and briefly addresses the publication and reception of Irish writers in the early United States, especially Thomas Moore and Maria Edgeworth, where they found an unpredictable and productive future.