He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World, and reported the following:
Turning to page 99 of my book, readers will learn how plantation labor regimes led to dehumanizing and simianizing rhetoric among slaveholders in the Tidewater Chesapeake in the eighteenth century. Landon Carter, a well-known enslaver in Richmond County, Virginia, believed that enslaved laborers could “as little be humanized as bears”, and that people of African descent were “nothing but a brute in human shape.” Likewise, Thomas Jefferson, another slaveholder in the Piedmont, claimed that people of African descent were like “our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals” with regard to their intellect and beauty.Learn more about Empire of Brutality at the LSU Press website.
My discussion of these two slaveholders is embedded in a chapter on slavery, human-animal relationships, and plantation labor in both the Caribbean and the American South. This chapter fits into my larger thesis that material relations between enslaved people and animals––in this chapter I discuss labor, diet, and the accumulation of bodily waste––led to intellectual frameworks for dehumanization in the long eighteenth century.
Page 99 of Empire of Brutality does reflect the critical aims of my book’s larger project, which is to examine human-animal linkages and pairings in the British Atlantic world. The book opens with a prologue examining a 1723 letter written by a group of enslaved people to the Bishop of London, asking him to act on behalf of their rights as Christians and to “looket in to” their subjugation by enslavers who “doo Look no more up on then if wee ware dogs.” Building on the work of other historians like Virginia Anderson and Marcy Norton, I argue that looking at various human-animal networks produced by slavery engendered the dehumanizing rhetoric of slaveholders like Carter and Jefferson. From there the book begins an ocean-spanning itinerary of slaving and slavery, from the castle trade along the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin to plantations in Barbados and Virginia. Throughout the book I look at trade, labor, and specimen collecting as sites of enslaved peopel’s animalization by slavers and slaveholders. To understand enslaved people’s resistance to dehumanization, I look at community-wide efforts for sabotage on plantations through killing and injuring animals, and a final chapter look at fugitive advertisements of enslaved women and men who stole horses to ride away. I end by discussing Black intellectuals like Qubna Ottobah Cugoano, Mary Prince, and A Slave, who attacked the philosophical foundations of slavery and animalization.
--Marshal Zeringue
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