Poisoned Relations

Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World

Chelsea Berry

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781512826500
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic world 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. A Weapon of the Weak or an Abuse of Power?
• Chapter 1. Pre-Atlantic Poisoning Cultures
• Chapter 2. Cross-Cultural Exchanges and Poison
• Chapter 3. Contested Idioms
• Chapter 4. Poison and the Belly
• Chapter 5. Binding Power
• Chapter 6. Creating Narratives About Poison
• Conclusion. “The Taken-for-Granted Must Cease to Be So”
• Appendix A. An Introduction to Comparative Historical Linguistics
• Appendix B. Language Classification Trees
• Appendix C. Word Roots
• Appendix D. Geographic Overview of Poisoning Cases
• Appendix E. Demographic Data
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments