In the Atlantic World, different groups were aromatically classified in opposition to other ethnic, gendered, and class assemblies due to an economic necessity that needed certain bodies to be defined as excremental, which culminated in the creation of a progressive tautology that linked Africa and waste through a conceptual hendiadys born of capitalist licentiousness. The African subject was defined as a scented object, appropriated as filthy to create levels of ownership through discourse that marked African peoples as unable to access spaces of Western modernity. Embodied cultural knowledge was potent enough to alter the biological function of the five senses to create a European olfactory consciousness made to sense the African other as foul. Fascinating, informative, and deeply researched, The Smell of Slavery exposes that concerns with pungency within the Western self were emitted outward upon the freshly dug outhouse of the mass slave grave called the Atlantic World.

This book addresses the Jihad movement that created the largest African state of the 19th century: the Sokoto Caliphate, existing for 99 years from 1804 until its military defeat by European colonial troops in 1903. The author carves out the entanglements of jihadist ideology and warfare with geographical concepts at Africa’s periphery of the Islamic world: geographical knowledge about the boundary between the “Land of Islam” and the “Land of War”; the pre-colonial construction of “the Muslim” and “the unbeliever”; and the transfer of ideas between political elites and mobile actors (traders, pilgrims, slaves, soldiers), whose reports helped shape new definitions of the African frontier of Islam. Research for this book is based on the study of a very wide range of Arabic and West African (Hausa, Fulfulde) manuscripts. Their policies reveal the persistent reciprocity of jihadist warfare and territorial statehood, of Africa and the Middle East. Stephanie Zehnle is Assistant Professor (JProf) of Extra-European History at Kiel University (Christian-Albrechts-Universität). Her work on African and trans-continental history includes research on the history of Islam, human-animal relations, and comics in Africa.

The small and remote island of Barbados seems an unlikely location for the epochal change in labor that overwhelmed it and much of British America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, by 1650 it had become the greatest wealth-producing area in the English-speaking world, the center of an exchange of people and goods between the British Isles, the Gold Coast of West Africa, and the New World. By the early seventeenth century, more than half a million enslaved men, women, and children had been transported to the island. In A New World of Labor, Simon P. Newman argues that this exchange stimulated an entirely new system of bound labor. Free and bound labor were defined and experienced by Britons and Africans across the British Atlantic world in quite different ways. Connecting social developments in seventeenth-century Britain with the British experience of slavery on the West African coast, Newman demonstrates that the brutal white servant regime, rather than the West African institution of slavery, provided the most significant foundation for the violent system of racialized black slavery that developed in Barbados. Class as much as race informed the creation of plantation slavery in Barbados and throughout British America. Enslaved Africans in Barbados were deployed in radically new ways in order to cultivate, process, and manufacture sugar on single, integrated plantations. This Barbadian system informed the development of racial slavery on Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, as well as in South Carolina and then the Deep South of mainland British North America. Drawing on British and West African precedents, and then radically reshaping them, Barbados planters invented a new world of labor.

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