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The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World
NEW YORK TIMES E DITOR'S CHOICE
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE RECOMMENDED BOOK
WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE
From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia , the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America's struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond
One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. In fact, they were performing an elaborate ruse, having risen up earlier and slaughtered most of the crew and officers. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception-that the men and women he thought were humble slaves were actually running the ship-he rallied his crew to respond with explosive violence.
Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity is the untold history of this extraordinary event and its bloody aftermath. Delano's blindness that day has already inspired one masterpiece-Herman Melville's Benito Cereno . Now historian Greg Grandin returns to these dramatic events to paint an indelible portrait of a world in the throes of revolution, providing a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas-and capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE RECOMMENDED BOOK
WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE
From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia , the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America's struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond
One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. In fact, they were performing an elaborate ruse, having risen up earlier and slaughtered most of the crew and officers. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception-that the men and women he thought were humble slaves were actually running the ship-he rallied his crew to respond with explosive violence.
Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity is the untold history of this extraordinary event and its bloody aftermath. Delano's blindness that day has already inspired one masterpiece-Herman Melville's Benito Cereno . Now historian Greg Grandin returns to these dramatic events to paint an indelible portrait of a world in the throes of revolution, providing a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas-and capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 5, 2014
78 people are currently reading
3829 people want to read
About the author
Greg Grandin
26 books542 followersGreg Grandin is the author of Fordlandia, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A Professor of History at New York University, Grandin has published a number of other award-winning books, including Empire's Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and The Blood of Guatemala.
Toni Morrison called Grandin's new work, The Empire of Necessity, "compelling, brilliant and necessary." Based on years of research on four continents, the book narrates the history of a slave-ship revolt that inspired Herman Melville's other masterpiece, Benito Cereno. Philip Gourevitch describes it as a "rare book in which the drama of the action and the drama of ideas are equally measured, a work of history and of literary reflection that is as urgent as it is timely."
Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times.
He received his BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY, in 1992 and his PhD from Yale in 1999. He has been a guest on Democracy Now!, The Charlie Rose Show, and the Chris Hayes Show.
Toni Morrison called Grandin's new work, The Empire of Necessity, "compelling, brilliant and necessary." Based on years of research on four continents, the book narrates the history of a slave-ship revolt that inspired Herman Melville's other masterpiece, Benito Cereno. Philip Gourevitch describes it as a "rare book in which the drama of the action and the drama of ideas are equally measured, a work of history and of literary reflection that is as urgent as it is timely."
Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times.
He received his BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY, in 1992 and his PhD from Yale in 1999. He has been a guest on Democracy Now!, The Charlie Rose Show, and the Chris Hayes Show.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 161 reviews
November 23, 2013
I was lucky to receive this book from a Goodreads giveaway. The importance of this book is really not clear in the description on the book's cover. This is the history of a slave rebellion in the South Pacific that is thwarted by a New England ship Captain, Amasa Delano. However, this book is so much more than the story of that rebellion. Mr. Grandin uses that story as a springboard to illustrate and explore the history of freedom and slavery in all of the Americas. The rebellion takes place in 1805, not long after the Age of Freedom in the US when independence was being celebrated. The history covered in the book looks at different aspects of freedom and slavery and Mr. Grandin uses the literature of Herman Melville as illustration and point of discussion--referring frequently to both Moby Dick and Benito Cereno, which was Melville's version of the slave rebellion. In one of the latter chapters,discussing Amaso Delano, Mr. Grandin describes him as oblivious to "the deep undercurrents of history that churn beneath". But this book explores and represents these undercurrents, discussing varying aspects and ideas of freedom versus slavery in many different examples. He continues to illustrate these concepts through descriptions of South American society, of the whaling and sealing industries, and through comparisons to Melville's writings. For anyone who is interested in the concept of freedom and how we as human beings understand it this is a history that will widen the horizons. He never directly points toward this history and current day as connected but, of course, if we look at those "deep undercurrents" it is not hard to see them churning beneath our current day concepts of freedom. An excellent book!
February 21, 2014
Among the finest, most compelling works I've ever read on Latin America, on slavery, and on Melville. Also a complement or prequel to another great recent work on slavery, Walter Johnson's 'River of Dark Dreams.'
February 8, 2019
If you’re not immediately tempted to buy this book, but are at least tempted to test it, read the Epilogue: Herman Melville’s America (pp. 265 – 273). These few pages will give you a good idea of what you’re in for should you make the investment in time and money.
I, like most Americans, am well acquainted with the legacy of slavery—at least as far as slavery in these United States is concerned. But I must confess, I had no idea of the full extent of slavery in the Western Hemisphere until I read Professor Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity. Nor was I acquainted with the polemic surrounding slavery as shared by many of young America’s literati and aspiring philosophers.
As a philosophy major in college myself, I was naturally intrigued by observations such as the following, which we find on p. 89: “Not too long after this event, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel published his Phenomenology of Spirit, which contains what the historian David Brion Davis describes as the ‘most profound analysis of slavery ever written.’ Davis is referring to a short chapter that starts with the master believing he is a sovereign consciousness, independent of and superior to his slavish bondsman, even as he grows materially and psychically dependent on his slave. Soon, the solipsism of the master gives way to an intense awareness of the slave’s being, so much so that he can’t imagine the world without him. He comes to realize his utter dependence on the slave, not just on his labour but on the slave’s recognition of his very existence. In turn, the slave becomes aware of this dependence and realizes his equality. One philosopher has called Hegel’s description an ‘existential impasse.’ But it really isn’t an impasse, since there is an exit: the whole point of Hegel’s parable is to identify how human consciousness evolves, how it moves toward a higher level of freedom. It is out of the struggle between the master and the slave that a new world consciousness emerges. As Hegel wrote elsewhere, it wasn’t ‘so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated.”
As I said, I was a philosophy major in college. Call it a “natural” prejudice if you like, but I’ve always considered philosophy to be the mother of all knowledge. What Professor Grandin (as well as several other historians of late—like Barbara Tuchman and Louisa Burnham) has taught me is that history may well be the great father of all knowledge—or at least the great inseminator. After all, history provides us with names of people, dates, actions and events. And if the historians we read are reliable, we can rest assured that we’re not reading propaganda or mythology. I feel that Professor Greg Grandin is a reliable historian.
As an example, I give you this citation from pp. 67 – 68: “(t)he changes in Duxbury were slices of larger ones taking place throughout the new republic. Gordon Wood describes this period in American history, in the decades following the triumph of the revolution, as a great unraveling. ‘Everything seemed to be coming apart,’ he writes, ‘and murder, suicide, theft and mobbing became increasingly common responses to the burdens that liberty and the expectation of gain were placing on people.’ Far from creating a nation founded on ‘benevolence and selflessness, enlightened republicanism was breeding social competitiveness and individualism.’ Reverend Turner’s idea that ‘higher principles’ could temper private ambitions was put on its head. For many, private ambition was the higher principle. Everywhere rude men were accumulating great fortunes, speculating, lending money at high interest, price gouging, or seeking political office to advance not the ideals of the republic(,) but the interests of their particular class, or worse, just themselves, by ‘exploiting the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality.’ ‘The Revolution,’ Wood writes, was the source of its own contradictions.”’
Another point of interest I’ve noticed in my recent historical readings is what I’ll call a “device” historians use to illustrate how events might impact the life of a single human being. In Professor Grandin’s case, that “device” is Amasa Delano—whaler, sealer and (quite obviously) sailor. What I’ll call here a “key character” doesn’t always—and rarely is—the hero of our story. He’s simply a key to understanding how one individual copes with the evolution of a society or an entire world.
What I’m suggesting here might better be illustrated by the following citation, from pp. 70 – 71: “Delano thought that traveling the world would enlarge his mind and add to his wisdom, helping him to ‘subdue his prejudices,’ rise above petty provocations, and master the ‘divine art of extracting good from evil.’ But since, as he put it, he owed his tolerance and open-mindedness to his ability to ‘generalise his observations, principles, and feelings,’ he was, in a way, expecting to confirm what he already believed, ideas concerning reason, free will, and man’s capacity for self-mastery that he had been taught by ministers like Turner and Brown. But what he found in the world was quite different, something that didn’t confirm his certainty(,) but crushed it.”
Elsewhere (on p. 235), we find this description of Amasa Delano: “Delano is the rule. Where the mesmeric Ahab—the ‘thunder-cloven old oak’—has been taken as a prototype of the twentieth-century totalitarian, a one-legged Hitler or Stalin, Delano represents a more common form of modern authority. His power is based not on the demagogic pull of charisma(,) but on the everyday pressures involved in controlling labour and converting diminishing natural resources into marketable items. Caught in the pincers of supply and demand and trapped in the vortex of ecological exhaustion, with his own crew on the brink of mutiny because there are no seals left to kill and no money to be made, Delano rallies men to the chase, not of a white whale(,) but of black rebels. Their slide into barbarism, followed by his pursuit, relentless while at the same time mundane, of Benito Cerreño for half the value of his ship and its cargo, happens not because he is dissenting from the laws of commerce and capital(,) but because he faithfully and routinely administers them. He had ‘knowledge of his duty,’ as he said, and was ‘disposed faithfully to obey its dictates.’”
Or this brief bit, on p. 257: “Delano himself described his life, when he was in the Bass Strait thinking he was going to drown, as filled with ‘hardships and privations, besides many heartrending scenes of injustice, in gratitude, and disappointment.”
But alas, all men have to die—even our heroes. And so, on p. 262, we find: “Amasa died two years later, in 1823, from what seems to have been a heart attack. He wasn’t alone. Delano lived with his wife, sisters, and nephews. Judging from his correspondence, though, he felt isolated.”
And on the following page (263), we read: “Amasa’s total estate comprised one threadbare hammock, assessed at fifty cents, an old pine writing desk, also worth fifty cents, and seven hundred copies of A Narrative of Voyages and Travels —that is, a relic from his sailing life, the hammock, another from his writing life, the desk, and his books, the unsold sum of both.”
The Empire of Necessity is neither an easy read nor a particularly pleasant read. It’s a necessary read. It’s the kind of read and story all of us white-skinned, privileged citizens of the Western World need to read in order to better understand how current events find a source and a “reason” in what started centuries ago, but many of which continue—in one unsavory form or another—even unto our day.
RRB
Brooklyn, NY
04 February 2019
I, like most Americans, am well acquainted with the legacy of slavery—at least as far as slavery in these United States is concerned. But I must confess, I had no idea of the full extent of slavery in the Western Hemisphere until I read Professor Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity. Nor was I acquainted with the polemic surrounding slavery as shared by many of young America’s literati and aspiring philosophers.
As a philosophy major in college myself, I was naturally intrigued by observations such as the following, which we find on p. 89: “Not too long after this event, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel published his Phenomenology of Spirit, which contains what the historian David Brion Davis describes as the ‘most profound analysis of slavery ever written.’ Davis is referring to a short chapter that starts with the master believing he is a sovereign consciousness, independent of and superior to his slavish bondsman, even as he grows materially and psychically dependent on his slave. Soon, the solipsism of the master gives way to an intense awareness of the slave’s being, so much so that he can’t imagine the world without him. He comes to realize his utter dependence on the slave, not just on his labour but on the slave’s recognition of his very existence. In turn, the slave becomes aware of this dependence and realizes his equality. One philosopher has called Hegel’s description an ‘existential impasse.’ But it really isn’t an impasse, since there is an exit: the whole point of Hegel’s parable is to identify how human consciousness evolves, how it moves toward a higher level of freedom. It is out of the struggle between the master and the slave that a new world consciousness emerges. As Hegel wrote elsewhere, it wasn’t ‘so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated.”
As I said, I was a philosophy major in college. Call it a “natural” prejudice if you like, but I’ve always considered philosophy to be the mother of all knowledge. What Professor Grandin (as well as several other historians of late—like Barbara Tuchman and Louisa Burnham) has taught me is that history may well be the great father of all knowledge—or at least the great inseminator. After all, history provides us with names of people, dates, actions and events. And if the historians we read are reliable, we can rest assured that we’re not reading propaganda or mythology. I feel that Professor Greg Grandin is a reliable historian.
As an example, I give you this citation from pp. 67 – 68: “(t)he changes in Duxbury were slices of larger ones taking place throughout the new republic. Gordon Wood describes this period in American history, in the decades following the triumph of the revolution, as a great unraveling. ‘Everything seemed to be coming apart,’ he writes, ‘and murder, suicide, theft and mobbing became increasingly common responses to the burdens that liberty and the expectation of gain were placing on people.’ Far from creating a nation founded on ‘benevolence and selflessness, enlightened republicanism was breeding social competitiveness and individualism.’ Reverend Turner’s idea that ‘higher principles’ could temper private ambitions was put on its head. For many, private ambition was the higher principle. Everywhere rude men were accumulating great fortunes, speculating, lending money at high interest, price gouging, or seeking political office to advance not the ideals of the republic(,) but the interests of their particular class, or worse, just themselves, by ‘exploiting the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality.’ ‘The Revolution,’ Wood writes, was the source of its own contradictions.”’
Another point of interest I’ve noticed in my recent historical readings is what I’ll call a “device” historians use to illustrate how events might impact the life of a single human being. In Professor Grandin’s case, that “device” is Amasa Delano—whaler, sealer and (quite obviously) sailor. What I’ll call here a “key character” doesn’t always—and rarely is—the hero of our story. He’s simply a key to understanding how one individual copes with the evolution of a society or an entire world.
What I’m suggesting here might better be illustrated by the following citation, from pp. 70 – 71: “Delano thought that traveling the world would enlarge his mind and add to his wisdom, helping him to ‘subdue his prejudices,’ rise above petty provocations, and master the ‘divine art of extracting good from evil.’ But since, as he put it, he owed his tolerance and open-mindedness to his ability to ‘generalise his observations, principles, and feelings,’ he was, in a way, expecting to confirm what he already believed, ideas concerning reason, free will, and man’s capacity for self-mastery that he had been taught by ministers like Turner and Brown. But what he found in the world was quite different, something that didn’t confirm his certainty(,) but crushed it.”
Elsewhere (on p. 235), we find this description of Amasa Delano: “Delano is the rule. Where the mesmeric Ahab—the ‘thunder-cloven old oak’—has been taken as a prototype of the twentieth-century totalitarian, a one-legged Hitler or Stalin, Delano represents a more common form of modern authority. His power is based not on the demagogic pull of charisma(,) but on the everyday pressures involved in controlling labour and converting diminishing natural resources into marketable items. Caught in the pincers of supply and demand and trapped in the vortex of ecological exhaustion, with his own crew on the brink of mutiny because there are no seals left to kill and no money to be made, Delano rallies men to the chase, not of a white whale(,) but of black rebels. Their slide into barbarism, followed by his pursuit, relentless while at the same time mundane, of Benito Cerreño for half the value of his ship and its cargo, happens not because he is dissenting from the laws of commerce and capital(,) but because he faithfully and routinely administers them. He had ‘knowledge of his duty,’ as he said, and was ‘disposed faithfully to obey its dictates.’”
Or this brief bit, on p. 257: “Delano himself described his life, when he was in the Bass Strait thinking he was going to drown, as filled with ‘hardships and privations, besides many heartrending scenes of injustice, in gratitude, and disappointment.”
But alas, all men have to die—even our heroes. And so, on p. 262, we find: “Amasa died two years later, in 1823, from what seems to have been a heart attack. He wasn’t alone. Delano lived with his wife, sisters, and nephews. Judging from his correspondence, though, he felt isolated.”
And on the following page (263), we read: “Amasa’s total estate comprised one threadbare hammock, assessed at fifty cents, an old pine writing desk, also worth fifty cents, and seven hundred copies of A Narrative of Voyages and Travels —that is, a relic from his sailing life, the hammock, another from his writing life, the desk, and his books, the unsold sum of both.”
The Empire of Necessity is neither an easy read nor a particularly pleasant read. It’s a necessary read. It’s the kind of read and story all of us white-skinned, privileged citizens of the Western World need to read in order to better understand how current events find a source and a “reason” in what started centuries ago, but many of which continue—in one unsavory form or another—even unto our day.
RRB
Brooklyn, NY
04 February 2019
March 3, 2014
Benito Cereno was a 19th century sea captain. “Benito Cereno” is also a novelette that was written by Herman Melville Melville’s story was based on a true life slaver, Cereno, and a slave uprising that Melville’s relative, another sea captain named Amasa Delano, happens upon in the Pacific in 1805. Slave uprisings happened but were fairly unusual but on Cereno’s ship, the Tryal, the Muslim slaves decide to murder their captors and requisition the ship to take them back to Africa. Most of this takes place during their holiest holiday…Ramadan.
It seems like life on the sea was a risky proposal during this period and often an unsavory one. The way to make the big money didn’t revolve around regular goods. Hunting whales for their oil, killing seals for their fur, running drugs, and slaving were where the profits were. Slavery was incredibly widespread at this time and occurred almost everywhere but the Spanish, English and French were determined to use slaves to make their new holdings in the America’s profitable. Being a slave was horrible but the journey across the ocean was just as deadly as the work they were heading for. People were kept shackled in the hold of the ship and seldom saw daylight on the long trip between continents. They were barely fed and left in their own excrement. Many died.
Grandin’s account is wonderful/horrible because he looks directly at the deplorable conditions, the inhumanity, and the empire building that occurred. He intersperses the facts with an analysis of Melville’s fictional account of this slave uprising. History and literary criticism all rolled into one book.
This review is based on an Advance Readers Copy furnished by the publisher.
(Disclaimer given as required by the FTC.)
It seems like life on the sea was a risky proposal during this period and often an unsavory one. The way to make the big money didn’t revolve around regular goods. Hunting whales for their oil, killing seals for their fur, running drugs, and slaving were where the profits were. Slavery was incredibly widespread at this time and occurred almost everywhere but the Spanish, English and French were determined to use slaves to make their new holdings in the America’s profitable. Being a slave was horrible but the journey across the ocean was just as deadly as the work they were heading for. People were kept shackled in the hold of the ship and seldom saw daylight on the long trip between continents. They were barely fed and left in their own excrement. Many died.
Grandin’s account is wonderful/horrible because he looks directly at the deplorable conditions, the inhumanity, and the empire building that occurred. He intersperses the facts with an analysis of Melville’s fictional account of this slave uprising. History and literary criticism all rolled into one book.
This review is based on an Advance Readers Copy furnished by the publisher.
(Disclaimer given as required by the FTC.)
September 20, 2022
Grandin the God. Probably the best living historian today in terms of writing talent. Incredible and unknown (to me) story of the slave revolts during the Atlantic Slave trade. I especially loved learning about how Muslims were so much more likely to revolt (due to literacy and belief in egalitarianism, or more than the Catholics) the Spanish tried banning their import. I only wish the Muslims had won their Jihad against the Spaniards in the Iberian Peninsula. How different would the world be today.
January 2, 2022
Każdy, kto ma odrobinę oleju w głowie, doskonale rozumie, jak niesprawiedliwe oraz niemiarodajne są średnie ocen na książkowych portalach, i na pewno nie polega na nich przy doborze własnych lektur. Ciekawi mnie jednak, czy istnieje ktoś, komu na widok wyjątkowo niskiej noty nie zapaliłaby się w głowie czerwona lampka. Nawet jeśli dana pozycja wydawałaby mi się całkiem przyzwoita i wyjątkowo trafiałaby w jego tematyczne gusta. Z tej też przyczyny do "Imperium konieczności" Grega Grandina - którego wcześniejsze dzieło zatytułowane "Fordlandia" znalazło się w finale Nagrody Pulitzera dla Najlepszej Książki Historycznej - podchodziłam jak do jeża i kupiłam dopiero, gdy udało mi się je zdobyć za dyszkę. Teraz opowiem Wam, jak dobrze było to wydane dziesięć złotych i jak bardzo załamuje mnie poziom czytania ze zrozumieniem w narodzie.
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February 28, 2014
Frankly, much about this book was really uncomfortable to read. And yet paradoxically, I finished its almost 300 pages (including reading most of its many footnotes) in a very few days. The book's surface narrative follows the seafaring peregrinations of New Englander Amasa Delano, focusing-in on his 1805 encounter with a slave rebellion on the ship Tryal off the coast of Chile. The undercurrents of the book were about the enslavement of one race by another; about inner darkness invading the souls of slavers and New England seafarers alike.
Grandin's writing is eminently readable, even captivating at times. Grandin took me into the world of free-enterprise slave trading that shaped colonial and subsequent Western Hemisphere civilization beginning in the sixteenth century. Grandin demonstrates how slave trading, and slave labor, was the foundation underpinning the growing wealth of the Americas. Grandin makes the seafaring world of the eighteenth century come alive from the execrable holds of slave ships to the holocausts of Pacific sealing.
Eighteenth century New England protagonist Amasa Delano was a political liberal; and yet his livelihood was as much dependent on the institution of slavery as any Southern plantation owner or Latin American hacienda. Banking, insurance, trade between New England and Latin America, the growth of northern, Ivy League Universities - all of this and more grew out of economies existing because Africans were enslaved in the Americas.
Many books have been written about the realities of Europeans enslaving Africans. This is the book that spoke powerfully to me. Its retelling of the journeys of people from their homes in Africa to their rebellion on the Tryal brought their gritty, agonizing existence to life again. The Empire of Necessity reflected the alienation of an uncaring, unaware civilization. Raw power and greed needed slaves in order to maintain a dark inner awareness of its false-self identity.
I was born in mid-twentieth century, Midwestern, urban America, a part of America rife with de-facto racial segregation, an existential reality that emerged from the enslavement of Africans. Grandin's book connected my personal revulsion with racial segregation with my unavoidable immersion in the social domination system that created and maintained it.
This review may seem dark, but darkness and light really are but two sides of the same reality. Just as Greg Grandin wove strands from the mundane world of the 17th and 18th centuries into a transcendent tapestry comprehending the dark realities of enslavement, so also acknowledgement of those realities can enlighten new responses in our caring for each other in the 21st century.
Grandin's writing is eminently readable, even captivating at times. Grandin took me into the world of free-enterprise slave trading that shaped colonial and subsequent Western Hemisphere civilization beginning in the sixteenth century. Grandin demonstrates how slave trading, and slave labor, was the foundation underpinning the growing wealth of the Americas. Grandin makes the seafaring world of the eighteenth century come alive from the execrable holds of slave ships to the holocausts of Pacific sealing.
Eighteenth century New England protagonist Amasa Delano was a political liberal; and yet his livelihood was as much dependent on the institution of slavery as any Southern plantation owner or Latin American hacienda. Banking, insurance, trade between New England and Latin America, the growth of northern, Ivy League Universities - all of this and more grew out of economies existing because Africans were enslaved in the Americas.
Many books have been written about the realities of Europeans enslaving Africans. This is the book that spoke powerfully to me. Its retelling of the journeys of people from their homes in Africa to their rebellion on the Tryal brought their gritty, agonizing existence to life again. The Empire of Necessity reflected the alienation of an uncaring, unaware civilization. Raw power and greed needed slaves in order to maintain a dark inner awareness of its false-self identity.
I was born in mid-twentieth century, Midwestern, urban America, a part of America rife with de-facto racial segregation, an existential reality that emerged from the enslavement of Africans. Grandin's book connected my personal revulsion with racial segregation with my unavoidable immersion in the social domination system that created and maintained it.
This review may seem dark, but darkness and light really are but two sides of the same reality. Just as Greg Grandin wove strands from the mundane world of the 17th and 18th centuries into a transcendent tapestry comprehending the dark realities of enslavement, so also acknowledgement of those realities can enlighten new responses in our caring for each other in the 21st century.
March 28, 2015
I was interested in the book because it is about the real events that inspired Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno." The story goes that slaves on a slave ship rebelled, killed much of the crew, and were trying to get back to Africa when they came in sight of an American ship hunting seals. The captain of that ship saw the run-down state of the slaver, and knowing nothing else about it, brought food and water and boarded it. The slaves came up with a scheme to deceive him - they pretended to be slaves and made the crew of the ship play along. The American captain spent EIGHT HOURS on board and didn't figure it out. Only when he was leaving, and the slaver's captain leaped over the side of the ship into his transport boat, did he get a clue.
It's a great story, and Melville makes much of the American captain's prejudice (and stupidity) utterly blinding him. Black people, to him, are good-natured followers of their superiors. The master-slave relationship between the captain and his "servant" is close, familial, touching even. The American is unable to imagine that the slaves have motives and thoughts of their own. Of course Melville turns it into a huge metaphor regarding "freedom" - on an individual level as well as slavery as an institution. There is a lot of debate over what Melville really thought about the institution, but when I read "Benito" & Melville's other stuff, there is too much sympathy and humanization (is that a word?) of blacks (Pip, in "Moby Dick" is the only person who can "see") for me to believe that he was ambivalent about it.
So here is this great, crazy, true story, and here is Melville's interpretation of it ... And "The Empire of Necessity" explains it all, from the ground up. All about slavery in South America. I learned that this particular lot of slaves has been marched OVER THE ANDES which was a common journey for poorly clothed and fed slaves bound for the west coast of South America. The ruthless cruelty with which the slaves were treated belies the true motives of the oppressors ... If slaves were so valuable why wasn't preservation of their lives and health a bigger priority? It can only be understood by a need to dominate and oppress - prejudice in its most violent form.
This book is so well-written, and just horrifying, and explains an important part of our history that we should all know, and don't. Why did slavers throw slaves overboard sometimes? (Hint: insurance law.) How was emancipation linked with independence from Spain in South America, and how did that make the history of slavery and freedom so different in South America v. the U.S.? Anyone who thinks slaves were docile and accepted their fate (I think I thought that, a little bit) will have her eyes opened - the hundreds of revolts on slave ships alone, to say nothing of revolts on land - are a major part of how emancipation came about in both N and S Americas. I learned a lot, and became even more bitter about justification for maltreatment of workers (slaves or "free") - the arguments of the pro-slavery bunch back then sound EXACTLY like the arguments against the minimum wage, labor unions, etc., nowadays. Oh, if we can't have our slaves, the economy will collapse. We all need to worship at the almighty temple of Business, and any objection about human rights or wage fairness will be squashed as squeamish liberalism. It's the worker's fault that they aren't more successful, they are obviously inferior, they have tons of opportunities to better themselves, they are lazy, the only way we can get them to work at all is to treat them horribly. It sounds exactly like the British toward the Irish during the Famine; it sounds exactly like arguments against the minimum wage; it sounds exactly like arguments against immigrants; it sounds exactly like the child-labor debates of a century ago.
And for Melville fans it just ROCKS. Tons of detail about him, his father-in-law, a Massachusetts Supreme Court judge, who sent a 17-year-old escaped slave back to Virginia under the Fugitive Slave Act (the slave was publicly whipped and sent to work in the fields). What did Melville think "freedom" was and how does that theme show up in all his work? I could read about that forever.
It's a great story, and Melville makes much of the American captain's prejudice (and stupidity) utterly blinding him. Black people, to him, are good-natured followers of their superiors. The master-slave relationship between the captain and his "servant" is close, familial, touching even. The American is unable to imagine that the slaves have motives and thoughts of their own. Of course Melville turns it into a huge metaphor regarding "freedom" - on an individual level as well as slavery as an institution. There is a lot of debate over what Melville really thought about the institution, but when I read "Benito" & Melville's other stuff, there is too much sympathy and humanization (is that a word?) of blacks (Pip, in "Moby Dick" is the only person who can "see") for me to believe that he was ambivalent about it.
So here is this great, crazy, true story, and here is Melville's interpretation of it ... And "The Empire of Necessity" explains it all, from the ground up. All about slavery in South America. I learned that this particular lot of slaves has been marched OVER THE ANDES which was a common journey for poorly clothed and fed slaves bound for the west coast of South America. The ruthless cruelty with which the slaves were treated belies the true motives of the oppressors ... If slaves were so valuable why wasn't preservation of their lives and health a bigger priority? It can only be understood by a need to dominate and oppress - prejudice in its most violent form.
This book is so well-written, and just horrifying, and explains an important part of our history that we should all know, and don't. Why did slavers throw slaves overboard sometimes? (Hint: insurance law.) How was emancipation linked with independence from Spain in South America, and how did that make the history of slavery and freedom so different in South America v. the U.S.? Anyone who thinks slaves were docile and accepted their fate (I think I thought that, a little bit) will have her eyes opened - the hundreds of revolts on slave ships alone, to say nothing of revolts on land - are a major part of how emancipation came about in both N and S Americas. I learned a lot, and became even more bitter about justification for maltreatment of workers (slaves or "free") - the arguments of the pro-slavery bunch back then sound EXACTLY like the arguments against the minimum wage, labor unions, etc., nowadays. Oh, if we can't have our slaves, the economy will collapse. We all need to worship at the almighty temple of Business, and any objection about human rights or wage fairness will be squashed as squeamish liberalism. It's the worker's fault that they aren't more successful, they are obviously inferior, they have tons of opportunities to better themselves, they are lazy, the only way we can get them to work at all is to treat them horribly. It sounds exactly like the British toward the Irish during the Famine; it sounds exactly like arguments against the minimum wage; it sounds exactly like arguments against immigrants; it sounds exactly like the child-labor debates of a century ago.
And for Melville fans it just ROCKS. Tons of detail about him, his father-in-law, a Massachusetts Supreme Court judge, who sent a 17-year-old escaped slave back to Virginia under the Fugitive Slave Act (the slave was publicly whipped and sent to work in the fields). What did Melville think "freedom" was and how does that theme show up in all his work? I could read about that forever.
September 6, 2016
I expected this book to have more information earlier in the book about the slave rebellion it is supposed to be about. Instead, I found myself reading more about slavery in general, especially in South America. I did find parts of it interesting, and learned more about the economic impact of slavery on New England even while slavery there was not common, and about slavery before the southern US was as heavily mired in it as it would become.
However, the writing felt disjointed to me. It didn't flow well, and I felt like I was looking at a kaleidescope of bits and pieces rather than a whole picture. Despite a highly emotional subject, it was somewhat dry.
I was prepared to read about slavery, as horrible a subject as that is. I was not prepared for a treatise on Moby Dick, a novel I've spent decades avoiding. And I especially was not prepared to read about the brutality, described in gory detail, of the whale and seal killing so prevalent then (and still today, to a lesser extent), even though I'd managed to make it through a description of the hide and meat market. I skimmed over some of that and started reading again, only to find that I really, really didn't want to go on. I quit halfway through. I don't often do that, but when I realize that a book has become a chore to read, I sometimes give myself a break.
While the book was interesting and did introduce me to some new material, the writing did not meet my expectations, and there was too much off-subject information I could not make myself read.
Given that, I think some readers will appreciate the good information it does contain, even though the writing disappointed me.
I was given an advance reader's copy of this book for review.
However, the writing felt disjointed to me. It didn't flow well, and I felt like I was looking at a kaleidescope of bits and pieces rather than a whole picture. Despite a highly emotional subject, it was somewhat dry.
I was prepared to read about slavery, as horrible a subject as that is. I was not prepared for a treatise on Moby Dick, a novel I've spent decades avoiding. And I especially was not prepared to read about the brutality, described in gory detail, of the whale and seal killing so prevalent then (and still today, to a lesser extent), even though I'd managed to make it through a description of the hide and meat market. I skimmed over some of that and started reading again, only to find that I really, really didn't want to go on. I quit halfway through. I don't often do that, but when I realize that a book has become a chore to read, I sometimes give myself a break.
While the book was interesting and did introduce me to some new material, the writing did not meet my expectations, and there was too much off-subject information I could not make myself read.
Given that, I think some readers will appreciate the good information it does contain, even though the writing disappointed me.
I was given an advance reader's copy of this book for review.
October 29, 2013
I'll be reviewing this for the Historical Novel Review. Until then, I can say that this was a powerful book. It will be one to reread to fully appreciate its depths. Highly recommended.
March 12, 2018
An excellent book about the South American slave trade. I recommend it for lovers of history, literature, and excellent writing.
Read
April 8, 2015I didn't choose to read this book because of the topic but, rather, because of the author. I'm a great admirer of the work of Greg Grandin. That said, I was hooked after the first few pages of this book. Mr. Grandin tells this story like no one else could. Amazing read -- amazing scholarship!
January 9, 2023
The banality of evil: when a self-proclaimed abolitionist puts down a slave revolt so he can meet payroll.
June 3, 2014
This is a large book. Not in its length as much as in its complexity, thematic ambition, and narrative richness. Grandin uses Herman Melville’s Benito Cerreno as his inspiration and North Star to investigate the complicated meaning of slavery, liberty, and race in the New World.
Melvill’s novella is based on the memoirs of a Yankee captain, Amasa Delano. Melville describes an incident in 1804. It occurred in the South Pacific off an island near the coast of Chile involving a slave ship, called the Tryal and owned and captained by Cerreno, that had been taken over by its most valuable cargo, resulting in the death of many of the crew, some of the slaves, and the murder of owner of the slaves. Delano and his ship, the Perseverance, were on their second voyage, this one a failure, to kill and skin seals for the Chinese market when they encounter Cerreno and the Tryal. Melville follows Delano’s account very closely in most places, transforming the narrative into a work of art. The slaves forced Cerreno to pretend he is still in charge of the ship in an effort to trick Delano into believing that the situation on the Tryal was normal. Delano spent the whole day on board the Tryal while his crew collected water and food for slaves and crew of Cerreno’s ship, who were very short of both. The ruse nearly worked. Though Delano was uneasy about the events that he observed on the Tryal, his expectations blinded him to the possibility that Cerreno had become the puppet of the slaves’ leaders, Mori and Babo. While slave rebellions on ships were not uncommon, no one would have thought that the slaves possessed sufficient agency and cleverness to successfully pull off such an elaborate hoax. It was only when Cerreno leaped into Delano’s skiff at the end of the Delano’s visit and told him that he was actually a prisoner on his own ship that Delano recognized that he had been duped. Rallying his own men, the crew of the Perseverance took control of the Tryal.
Another recurring theme of the book is the thwarting by freemen of slaves’ own struggle for freedom. Even slavers admitted that slaves could not be blamed for attempting to escape their bondage, that it was natural to strive for liberty when in the state of unfreedom. The claim by some slavers that blacks were less than human is contradicted by the forced baptism of slaves. This was an explicit admission that West Africans possessed as much of a spiritual life as any European, thus showing that the slaves were as human as their masters.
Grandin spends a great deal of time describing the life and voyages of Delano. Delano spent about 30 years at sea witnessing “many of the most storied episodes that mark the start of modern times.” (81) He was at Saratoga and Yorktown; sailed to Haiti many times before the slave revolution there; visited Canton and Macao just as China was opening up to the West; visited Hawaii just after Captain Cook’s death; was the first to tell the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty; described the Dutch roots of apartheid in South Africa; smoked opium with Moors in Malaysia, and more. He lived the kind of life that Joseph Conrad might have written about. The first Delano came over on the ship that arrived in the New World right after the Mayflower, and branches of this family produced 3 presidents: Grant, Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Amasa came from the sea town of Duxbury, Massachusetts The town’s preachers strayed from the predestination orthodoxy of the Calvinists and endorsed the individual autonomy for people to decide what best for themselves that mirrored the ideals of the American revolution. Individuals are able to check their passions, they are capable of self-mastery, and this belief stretched out to include self-government in the political realm. Delano adopted the revolutionary ideal that all men are created equal, and this belief led him to sympathize with the abolition movement.
Cerreno was a down on his luck Spaniard from a fading aristocratic family who sought his fortune, unsuccessfully, in trans-Atlantic trade. While it is uncertain where most of the slaves on his ship were from, many of them were from Senegal and at least some them were Muslim. One surprise for me was learning that a healthy percentage of West Africans were Muslims who could read Arabic. They were not the wild savages that plantation propaganda and Hollywood pictures portrayed. So what occurred on was a confluence among Yankee Protestantism, Spanish Catholicism, and African Sufism, the Muslim mystical sect most West African Muslims followed.
The story as Melville presents it illustrates one of his main literary themes: that freeman are not totally free because they are tangled up by “their thoughts and uncontrollable passions.” As Grandin put it:
“After the disappointment of Moby-Dick, he [Melville] became preoccupied with philosophy, with larger questions of ethics, withdrawn into himself to the point that he broke down. His disquiets were at once psychic and cosmic but not, apparently, primarily political….Yet it is exactly Melville’s existential digressions that speak directly to the problem of slavery in Western society, that go straight to the heart of what the massive and systemic subordination of millions and millions of human beings over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years meant to the societies that prospered from slavery and to the slaves who suffered creating that prosperity. Melville wrestled with whether life had meaning, and if it had, whether its meaning was rooted in radical individualism, in human interconnectivity, or in larger moral structures; he grappled with the despair of losing one’s self in a godless cosmos, with the conflict between notions of free will and predestination and thus between belief and disbelief, with the idea that the physical world was a mirage, that one needed to punch through the pasteboard mask of surface things and grasp the underlying reality. Slavery, in a way was the concrete manifestation of such metaphysical terrors, for it represented the same threat to real individuals as the possibility of a meaningless universe posed to the idea of the individual: obliteration.” These themes recurred in his novellas and poems, writings that did not attract a very large readership during his lifetime.
What Grandin explores in greater detail the irony that slavery in the New World provided the wealth and prosperity enabling freemen to think of the themselves as deserving and entitled to political freedom. The result was the American Revolution, the Haitian revolution led by slaves, and the Latin American revolutions. This is one of the lessons of the book.
Grandin visited numerous libraries and national archives to piece together what happened before and after the Cerreno incident. He spends chapters on the capture and journey of Cerrenos’s slaves, the capture by a French privateer, what it must have been like when they arrived at Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo and what those cities were like for Africans. He spends chapters describing their journey across the pampas to Mendoza, where earlier generations of Spaniards enslaved the local Indians to act as porters on the dangerous route over the Andes to Santiago, Chile. Those Indians were completely wiped out and eventually replaced by black slaves, many of whom fell off the narrow path to their death, path also taken and described by Charles Darwin.
As hinted in the last paragraph, Grandin’s book resembles Moby-Dick in the sense that he frequently digresses down what appear to be convoluted and inconsequential alleys. Yet, as in Moby-Dick, there is a purpose in expanding the overall context for the reader. For example, he spends pages upon pages describing seal hunting in all its detail. Melville does something similar with regards to whale hunting. The difference is that whale hunting seemed like a noble endeavor compared to seal hunting, a dirty and foul industry that wiped out the seal rookeries in the South Pacific in about a decade. During this discussion, Grandin is able to show how short-sighted greed and ignorance led ships’ masters to destroy the helpless seals and also describe the cruelty that many captains practiced on their crews. On a ship, the captain was the all-powerful master and crewmembers were no better than slaves. They had no rights, even on American ships. With the expansion of liberty, however, some sailors exercised their liberty by escaping, much like slaves, what must have seemed like unrelenting stress when in port or mutinied against perceived injustices while asea
In his notes, Grandin admits to being obsessed with his topic. That is obvious by the deep research and the care he takes in telling the story. The frequent interludes discussing Melville’s beliefs and writings and milieu helped deepen my understanding of Melville and the social, political, and economic underpinnings of the early 19th century. For the general reader like me there is much enlightenment and much to like in this book.
Melvill’s novella is based on the memoirs of a Yankee captain, Amasa Delano. Melville describes an incident in 1804. It occurred in the South Pacific off an island near the coast of Chile involving a slave ship, called the Tryal and owned and captained by Cerreno, that had been taken over by its most valuable cargo, resulting in the death of many of the crew, some of the slaves, and the murder of owner of the slaves. Delano and his ship, the Perseverance, were on their second voyage, this one a failure, to kill and skin seals for the Chinese market when they encounter Cerreno and the Tryal. Melville follows Delano’s account very closely in most places, transforming the narrative into a work of art. The slaves forced Cerreno to pretend he is still in charge of the ship in an effort to trick Delano into believing that the situation on the Tryal was normal. Delano spent the whole day on board the Tryal while his crew collected water and food for slaves and crew of Cerreno’s ship, who were very short of both. The ruse nearly worked. Though Delano was uneasy about the events that he observed on the Tryal, his expectations blinded him to the possibility that Cerreno had become the puppet of the slaves’ leaders, Mori and Babo. While slave rebellions on ships were not uncommon, no one would have thought that the slaves possessed sufficient agency and cleverness to successfully pull off such an elaborate hoax. It was only when Cerreno leaped into Delano’s skiff at the end of the Delano’s visit and told him that he was actually a prisoner on his own ship that Delano recognized that he had been duped. Rallying his own men, the crew of the Perseverance took control of the Tryal.
Another recurring theme of the book is the thwarting by freemen of slaves’ own struggle for freedom. Even slavers admitted that slaves could not be blamed for attempting to escape their bondage, that it was natural to strive for liberty when in the state of unfreedom. The claim by some slavers that blacks were less than human is contradicted by the forced baptism of slaves. This was an explicit admission that West Africans possessed as much of a spiritual life as any European, thus showing that the slaves were as human as their masters.
Grandin spends a great deal of time describing the life and voyages of Delano. Delano spent about 30 years at sea witnessing “many of the most storied episodes that mark the start of modern times.” (81) He was at Saratoga and Yorktown; sailed to Haiti many times before the slave revolution there; visited Canton and Macao just as China was opening up to the West; visited Hawaii just after Captain Cook’s death; was the first to tell the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty; described the Dutch roots of apartheid in South Africa; smoked opium with Moors in Malaysia, and more. He lived the kind of life that Joseph Conrad might have written about. The first Delano came over on the ship that arrived in the New World right after the Mayflower, and branches of this family produced 3 presidents: Grant, Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Amasa came from the sea town of Duxbury, Massachusetts The town’s preachers strayed from the predestination orthodoxy of the Calvinists and endorsed the individual autonomy for people to decide what best for themselves that mirrored the ideals of the American revolution. Individuals are able to check their passions, they are capable of self-mastery, and this belief stretched out to include self-government in the political realm. Delano adopted the revolutionary ideal that all men are created equal, and this belief led him to sympathize with the abolition movement.
Cerreno was a down on his luck Spaniard from a fading aristocratic family who sought his fortune, unsuccessfully, in trans-Atlantic trade. While it is uncertain where most of the slaves on his ship were from, many of them were from Senegal and at least some them were Muslim. One surprise for me was learning that a healthy percentage of West Africans were Muslims who could read Arabic. They were not the wild savages that plantation propaganda and Hollywood pictures portrayed. So what occurred on was a confluence among Yankee Protestantism, Spanish Catholicism, and African Sufism, the Muslim mystical sect most West African Muslims followed.
The story as Melville presents it illustrates one of his main literary themes: that freeman are not totally free because they are tangled up by “their thoughts and uncontrollable passions.” As Grandin put it:
“After the disappointment of Moby-Dick, he [Melville] became preoccupied with philosophy, with larger questions of ethics, withdrawn into himself to the point that he broke down. His disquiets were at once psychic and cosmic but not, apparently, primarily political….Yet it is exactly Melville’s existential digressions that speak directly to the problem of slavery in Western society, that go straight to the heart of what the massive and systemic subordination of millions and millions of human beings over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years meant to the societies that prospered from slavery and to the slaves who suffered creating that prosperity. Melville wrestled with whether life had meaning, and if it had, whether its meaning was rooted in radical individualism, in human interconnectivity, or in larger moral structures; he grappled with the despair of losing one’s self in a godless cosmos, with the conflict between notions of free will and predestination and thus between belief and disbelief, with the idea that the physical world was a mirage, that one needed to punch through the pasteboard mask of surface things and grasp the underlying reality. Slavery, in a way was the concrete manifestation of such metaphysical terrors, for it represented the same threat to real individuals as the possibility of a meaningless universe posed to the idea of the individual: obliteration.” These themes recurred in his novellas and poems, writings that did not attract a very large readership during his lifetime.
What Grandin explores in greater detail the irony that slavery in the New World provided the wealth and prosperity enabling freemen to think of the themselves as deserving and entitled to political freedom. The result was the American Revolution, the Haitian revolution led by slaves, and the Latin American revolutions. This is one of the lessons of the book.
Grandin visited numerous libraries and national archives to piece together what happened before and after the Cerreno incident. He spends chapters on the capture and journey of Cerrenos’s slaves, the capture by a French privateer, what it must have been like when they arrived at Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo and what those cities were like for Africans. He spends chapters describing their journey across the pampas to Mendoza, where earlier generations of Spaniards enslaved the local Indians to act as porters on the dangerous route over the Andes to Santiago, Chile. Those Indians were completely wiped out and eventually replaced by black slaves, many of whom fell off the narrow path to their death, path also taken and described by Charles Darwin.
As hinted in the last paragraph, Grandin’s book resembles Moby-Dick in the sense that he frequently digresses down what appear to be convoluted and inconsequential alleys. Yet, as in Moby-Dick, there is a purpose in expanding the overall context for the reader. For example, he spends pages upon pages describing seal hunting in all its detail. Melville does something similar with regards to whale hunting. The difference is that whale hunting seemed like a noble endeavor compared to seal hunting, a dirty and foul industry that wiped out the seal rookeries in the South Pacific in about a decade. During this discussion, Grandin is able to show how short-sighted greed and ignorance led ships’ masters to destroy the helpless seals and also describe the cruelty that many captains practiced on their crews. On a ship, the captain was the all-powerful master and crewmembers were no better than slaves. They had no rights, even on American ships. With the expansion of liberty, however, some sailors exercised their liberty by escaping, much like slaves, what must have seemed like unrelenting stress when in port or mutinied against perceived injustices while asea
In his notes, Grandin admits to being obsessed with his topic. That is obvious by the deep research and the care he takes in telling the story. The frequent interludes discussing Melville’s beliefs and writings and milieu helped deepen my understanding of Melville and the social, political, and economic underpinnings of the early 19th century. For the general reader like me there is much enlightenment and much to like in this book.
April 23, 2019
First, the bad.
1. I could have done without the graduate school-like philosophical navel gazing. Grandin becomes somewhat incoherent in these sections, and since I did not pick this up as a discourse in Herman Melville's political beliefs, these sections made me impatient. (Grandin includes them because he is writing about the historical 1804 slave uprising on Benito Cerreno's Tryal. Grandin uses Melville's 1855 fictional account Benito Cereno to discuss not only Melville's life, but his views on freedom and slavery, as well as the contemporaneous views of slavery.)
2. Grandin insinuates, implies, hand-waves, and points the reader to shiny objects when he weaves Islam into the story. The reader is led to believe that Mori and Babo were Muslims. Grandin has no evidence of this, except that Mori and Babo were trans-shipped from Senegal and by the early 1800s Islam had spread to sub-Saharan Africa via Muslim traders, slavers, and clerics. I suspect that he was trying to establish his "intersectional" bona fides because that is the current fashion in historiography. The discussion of Ramadan and the "Night of Power" (Laylet al-Qadr) seems tacked on as does his insistence on including the women singing to encourage the men.
Now the good!
Grandin's research into the context of the slave rebellion shows that the historical circumstances of the time were rich and complex. He weaves in privateering, piracy whaling, and hide trading as economic activities. He gives gruesome but true-to-life descriptions of the devastating and ecologically disastrous seal skin trade. He explains the ripple effects of the American and French Revolutions, the slave rebellion in Haiti, and the Spanish Wars of Independence. He gives us an understanding of the family background, motivations, and beliefs of Benito Cereno, Amaso Delano, Juan Nonell, Alejandro de Arando, Thomas Coffin, and Juan Martinez de Rozas.
I love it when I learn so very much from reading a book.
As Grandin states in the last paragraph of his introduction:
1. I could have done without the graduate school-like philosophical navel gazing. Grandin becomes somewhat incoherent in these sections, and since I did not pick this up as a discourse in Herman Melville's political beliefs, these sections made me impatient. (Grandin includes them because he is writing about the historical 1804 slave uprising on Benito Cerreno's Tryal. Grandin uses Melville's 1855 fictional account Benito Cereno to discuss not only Melville's life, but his views on freedom and slavery, as well as the contemporaneous views of slavery.)
2. Grandin insinuates, implies, hand-waves, and points the reader to shiny objects when he weaves Islam into the story. The reader is led to believe that Mori and Babo were Muslims. Grandin has no evidence of this, except that Mori and Babo were trans-shipped from Senegal and by the early 1800s Islam had spread to sub-Saharan Africa via Muslim traders, slavers, and clerics. I suspect that he was trying to establish his "intersectional" bona fides because that is the current fashion in historiography. The discussion of Ramadan and the "Night of Power" (Laylet al-Qadr) seems tacked on as does his insistence on including the women singing to encourage the men.
Now the good!
Grandin's research into the context of the slave rebellion shows that the historical circumstances of the time were rich and complex. He weaves in privateering, piracy whaling, and hide trading as economic activities. He gives gruesome but true-to-life descriptions of the devastating and ecologically disastrous seal skin trade. He explains the ripple effects of the American and French Revolutions, the slave rebellion in Haiti, and the Spanish Wars of Independence. He gives us an understanding of the family background, motivations, and beliefs of Benito Cereno, Amaso Delano, Juan Nonell, Alejandro de Arando, Thomas Coffin, and Juan Martinez de Rozas.
I love it when I learn so very much from reading a book.
As Grandin states in the last paragraph of his introduction:
The different routes that led all those involved in the drama to the Pacific reveal the fullness of the paradox of freedom and slavery in America, so pervasive it could trap not just slaves and slavers, but men who thought they were neither.
October 21, 2025
Depicting the most annoying man in history's successful thwarting of a slave revolt, The Empire of Necessity is an excellent explanation not only of the Tryal Slave Ship Rebellion but rather all of the layered circumstances that added up to the revolt occurring, being put down, and its aftermath. Part historical work, biography and literary critique Grandin finds every small detail in the accounting of the revolt and expands upon it. We hear about the rise of modern capitalist economics, how both enslaved and free thought of freedom, seal and whale hunting, as well as how the Spanish viewed Muslim slaves. Few rocks are not uncovered. This is both the strength and weakness of the book. If you (like I) do not mind these digressions then pick this one up, if you would rather a more direct historical work, then avoid. To add on, Grandin approaches the history in a narrative fashion, meaning that the book is somewhat disjointed, but overall it made the book a pleasure to read.
January 7, 2018
very informative, painful descriptions, but needed scholarship.
March 13, 2016
The Empire of Necessity is an exhaustive, meticulously documented, and fascinating look at the role of the slave trade in the economic and social development of the Americas. Grandin's focus is the real slave uprising and elaborate maritime deception that inspired Melville's novella Benito Cereno. But the book goes far beyond simply recounting this highly charged event: in the process of exploring the backgrounds of the people involved (including, impressively, tracking down the names and origins of many of the Africans who revolted against their captors) and tracing the historical currents that brought them together, Grandin delivers a sweeping and eye-opening indictment of the extent to which the world in the early 1800s was interconnected by the slave trade and powered by slave labor. Reading this book, I felt like I was prying open a piece of sleek technology to see the circuitry inside: it revealed the inner workings, more sophisticated and complex and cruel than I ever imagined, of the bland world history I learned in high school.
This is a scholarly book with an epic scope, but it's as readable as a suspense novel. Grandin doesn't only elucidate the historical and political forces at work behind the scenes of the central event, but also investigates the characters' backgrounds and relationships and speculates about their intellectual and emotional motivations. He even makes compelling deductions about Melville's connections with and attitudes toward the event he later related in Benito Cereno. This is the kind of history I wish I'd been taught in school: it's messy, complicated, and utterly human, with connections not only to politics and economics but also art, literature, science, and religion.
The Empire of Necessity is a tour de force that must have taken a staggering amount of research. My only complaint is that Grandin's narrative loses some of its force toward the end, when he investigates what became of Cerreño, Delano, Mori, and the others involved after their fateful encounter. It's as if the book spends all its energy building to the awful central event, and then loses steam in the aftermath. But this does little to diminish the power and scope of the work as a whole. Highly recommended for anyone who wants a more complete understanding of how not only the United States but the world as we know it was shaped.
This is a scholarly book with an epic scope, but it's as readable as a suspense novel. Grandin doesn't only elucidate the historical and political forces at work behind the scenes of the central event, but also investigates the characters' backgrounds and relationships and speculates about their intellectual and emotional motivations. He even makes compelling deductions about Melville's connections with and attitudes toward the event he later related in Benito Cereno. This is the kind of history I wish I'd been taught in school: it's messy, complicated, and utterly human, with connections not only to politics and economics but also art, literature, science, and religion.
The Empire of Necessity is a tour de force that must have taken a staggering amount of research. My only complaint is that Grandin's narrative loses some of its force toward the end, when he investigates what became of Cerreño, Delano, Mori, and the others involved after their fateful encounter. It's as if the book spends all its energy building to the awful central event, and then loses steam in the aftermath. But this does little to diminish the power and scope of the work as a whole. Highly recommended for anyone who wants a more complete understanding of how not only the United States but the world as we know it was shaped.
February 2, 2020
The good news is that I liked this book and I’m glad I read it. It dovetails nicely with several books/movies I’ve read, to include the Haitian Trilogy, Amistad, & 12 Years a Slave . I like the fact it talks about aspects of slavery and history that I’m not familiar with. But....the author just had too many ideas that he desperately wanted to tell us about. And they’re not bad ideas per se, it’s just that I needed the book to have more focus. Literally, every chapter ends in an “interlude”, and most chapters feature a fair bit of wandering around themselves.
Ok, so what’s it about?
At a high level, it’s about the slave trade in the 1800’s with a focus on South America. Specifically, it looks at a true historical event in which an American ship captain encounters a ship in distress. He eventually discovers that the ship was a slave ship in which the slaves had overtaken their captors. And from there, he explores the legal/moral/ethical ramifications of what happens next to all parties involved.
But in telling the true tale of what happens, the author wanders through various other related topics...
1. He discusses other slave ships in which the slaves overtook their captors...
2. Herman Melville...he also wrote a book on this very same incident, Benito Cereno, so we spend a lot of time analyzing Melville, Moby Dick, and Benito Cereno.
3. Revolutions and the concept of rebellion. We spend a lot of time pondering French, Haitian, Spanish, & US revolutions in the context of abolition and slavery.
4. The sealing and whaling industries...how they worked as well as topics related to over hunting.
5. Darwin...he visited a lot of the places mentioned in the book, so we hear about Darwin and his travel thoughts.
6. Travel in general...in many places, the story turns into a travelogue, describing scenery and architecture of South American cities like Lima.
7. Religion...we examine religion and what the various holy books have to say about slavery.
8. Local politics in the 1800’s...
9. The family histories of our protagonists...
You get the point: lots of interesting tangents and theses that tend to de-focus the narrative rather than tie it all together.
Worth reading, but....
Ok, so what’s it about?
At a high level, it’s about the slave trade in the 1800’s with a focus on South America. Specifically, it looks at a true historical event in which an American ship captain encounters a ship in distress. He eventually discovers that the ship was a slave ship in which the slaves had overtaken their captors. And from there, he explores the legal/moral/ethical ramifications of what happens next to all parties involved.
But in telling the true tale of what happens, the author wanders through various other related topics...
1. He discusses other slave ships in which the slaves overtook their captors...
2. Herman Melville...he also wrote a book on this very same incident, Benito Cereno, so we spend a lot of time analyzing Melville, Moby Dick, and Benito Cereno.
3. Revolutions and the concept of rebellion. We spend a lot of time pondering French, Haitian, Spanish, & US revolutions in the context of abolition and slavery.
4. The sealing and whaling industries...how they worked as well as topics related to over hunting.
5. Darwin...he visited a lot of the places mentioned in the book, so we hear about Darwin and his travel thoughts.
6. Travel in general...in many places, the story turns into a travelogue, describing scenery and architecture of South American cities like Lima.
7. Religion...we examine religion and what the various holy books have to say about slavery.
8. Local politics in the 1800’s...
9. The family histories of our protagonists...
You get the point: lots of interesting tangents and theses that tend to de-focus the narrative rather than tie it all together.
Worth reading, but....
October 10, 2021
Szukacie solidnej książki, która poszerzy Waszą wiedzę o niewolnictwie? To pozycję Grandina śmiało możecie sobie odpuścić. W „Imperium konieczności”, wbrew temu co zapowiada opis, samego przemysłu niewolniczego jest jak na lekarstwo. Autor poświęca temu tematowi - jedną szóstą? jedną siódmą? - całej książki. Dosłownie ułamek. Lwią część „Imperium” stanowi biografia żyjącego na przełomie XIII i XIX wieku kapitana Amasy Delano. A, że Delano do najcharyzmatyczniejszych jednostek nie należał, a i życie wiódł całkiem przeciętne i pozbawione jakiś bardziej ekscytujących przygód, to i czyta się to bez większych emocji, za to ze zniżeniem. Co jakiś czas Grandin pokusi się o kolejne dygresje od przewodniego tematu poświęcając pokaźne fragmenty, a nawet całe rozdziały, opisom miasta Montevideo czy polowań na foki. I teoretycznie w pewien sposób łączą się te tematy z niewolnictwem, jednak są to połączenia wyjątkowo grubymi nićmi szyte. Bo do portu w Montevideo zawijały statki z niewolnikami, a uczestnikami polowań na foki często byli przemytnicy. I nie zapominajmy, że do polowań na foki używa się statków, a niewolnicy też są przewożeni na statkach. Łapiecie powiązanie? Brzmi śmiesznie, ale właśnie takie jest rozumowanie i argumentacja autora. Tylko, że idąc tym tokiem myślenia to można napisać książkę popularnonaukową o kosmosie i 3/4 rozdziałów poświęcić biografii Jarosława Kaczyńskiego (bo przecież on z bratem księżyc kradł w dzieciństwie!). W skrócie, pozycja o masie innych rzeczy tylko nie o niewolnictwie.
instagram
March 23, 2014
Fascinating, gripping in-depth exploration of the players and context of the 1805 event where Captain Amasa Delano (FDR ancestor) & ship encounter a Spanish ship, off the coast of S. America, whose slaves mutinied and enacted a ruse that captain Cerreno was still in charge, and not them actually calling the shots. The incident was immortalized in a Herman Melville (*Moby Dick* author) novella, though it takes some liberties with Delano's memoir recollection of the event.
Grandin possesses a compelling writing style as he profiles the principle players, politics of the age, the prism of which Melville was peering from almost 50 years later, the paradox of the dawn of Age of Liberty coinciding with the massive uptick in slave trade, the life of a sealer (and whalers) captains and crew, the seeds of liberty blown by American revolution, etc.
Grandin possesses a compelling writing style as he profiles the principle players, politics of the age, the prism of which Melville was peering from almost 50 years later, the paradox of the dawn of Age of Liberty coinciding with the massive uptick in slave trade, the life of a sealer (and whalers) captains and crew, the seeds of liberty blown by American revolution, etc.
December 1, 2015
I really enjoyed the intertwining of the history and literature. Grandin retells the story of a slave revolt that was later retold in a work of "fiction" by Herman Melville. And the result is a mix of beautiful and revolting. There are some oddities about this book and it does wander all over the place, from a history of slavery to sealing to Charles Darwin. But it all comes together as part of the story, the backdrop, for this particular story.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning about slavery, especially the slave trade that occurred in South America. The other parts, especially the weaving in of Melville's literature and philosophy, is a treat and compliments what would otherwise be a straightforward historical novel.
This was definitely one of my favorite books of the year.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning about slavery, especially the slave trade that occurred in South America. The other parts, especially the weaving in of Melville's literature and philosophy, is a treat and compliments what would otherwise be a straightforward historical novel.
This was definitely one of my favorite books of the year.
January 17, 2014
I was very excited to win this book through the First Reads program, as the provided description made it sound right up my alley--unfortunately, Grandin's writing style wasn't to my taste. While it's obvious that he did massive amounts of research for this book, and I did appreciate the depth of his knowledge and expertise, I wanted a more sharply focused narrative instead of so many rambling passages about topics only tangentially related to his main one. (The long description of the gruesome realities of 19th century seal hunting especially got to me.)
I'm sure that other readers will love Grandin's somewhat aimless wandering of the historical landscape here, and I did give him 3 stars for the quality of his research, but overall the book wasn't for me.
I'm sure that other readers will love Grandin's somewhat aimless wandering of the historical landscape here, and I did give him 3 stars for the quality of his research, but overall the book wasn't for me.
December 16, 2013
I was fortunate enough to receive an advanced copy of this book, and enjoyed it thoroughly. While the book provides some good backstory of all the major and minor role players in the Tryal debacle, I felt the best part of this book was the insights into the times in which the event occurred including slavery and literary works of the period. Special attention is placed on Melville and his Benito Cereno, which is based on the root occurrence of this book, and provides some worthwhile commentary on his interpretation of Melville’s motive behind his retelling. I would highly recommend the book to anyone who would even be remotely interested in the subject matter or who has read or wants to read Benito Cereno.
December 28, 2014
A truly fascinating book that puts slavery in a global context. Using a slave rebellion on a ship off the coast of Chile as the central event, the author shows how the economic institution of slavery extended its tendrils throughout the world, making virtually anyone participating in any marketplace complicit in the evils of slavery. Sobering and fascinating, there are some obvious parallels to everyone's complicity in climate change (he writes sitting at a computer with the lights on and the furnace working).
June 25, 2016
At first I thought this was going to be a large-scale treatment of the issue of slavery and freedom in the New World [1], a massive subject given the amount of material that would require. Instead, this is a book whose ambition lies in a different course, an accomplished and thought-provoking work of revisionist history that starts with a small incident and uncovers its repercussions and complications several steps back and forward, seeking to determine deeper relevance from what on the surface is a small incident among many. The end result is a work that is richly layered and deeply humane, but also highly troubling and gloomy, in that it reveals a double-mind at the basis of our existence that continues to haunt us as people and as societies. This is not, therefore, a lighthearted work in the least but rather one full of challenges that does not offer easy answers but rather the promise of moral and intellectual struggle.
The incident at the heart of this book is the ironic class between Amasa Delana, an antislavery New England sealer seeking economic freedom in a situation of ecological collapse, and a ship of rebellious slaves full of partly-Muslim West Africans led by people named Bobo and Mori who had killed most of the whites on the boat but had the boat’s pilot/owner Benito Cerreño piloting them to what they think is freedom. The end result for the slaves is the fate that awaited many of the whites on the boat, a gruesome death. That said, none of the people here make it out particularly happily, and the incident itself became the basis for a significant story by Herman Melville. The repercussions of this story include a look at Islam and Catholicism in Spain and West Africa, the roots of slavery and insurance law, piracy, the complex interply between free trade and human degradation, the literature of Melville and his contemporaries, the relationship between racial and social politics in the United States and Latin America, slave results, and a wide variety of other details. The author himself appears a bit too favorable to Islam, which is a notable flaw given the fact that Islam is one of the main forces of reactionary and inhumane behaviors in the contemporary world, but for the most part this is a thoughtful book that seeks both to provoke the reader into a deep examination of the tensions at the base of our world but also to point out the essential humanity of all of the people involved, regardless of their social position.
Truthfully, no one comes out of this story looking particularly heroic, not the slaves who rise up from their oppression only to become brutal murderers who feign servility in order to avoid their just desserts, not the Spanish and American merchants and judges who combine an interest in free trade (whether through smuggling or piracy or legal means) mainly as a way to be free of regulation from above even as they increasingly regulate those below them, not antislavery New England merchants whose wealth and profits are increasingly tied to environmental degradation as well as the slave trade, nor Spanish imperialists whose weakness in dealing with the French as well as restive colonials lead them to fail in their duties to protect the people they govern, nor in the ordinary men and women whose role in the slave trade appears to have been made for either social advancement or to try to keep from falling further down the social ladder, often with tragic results. Though no one looks particularly heroic, everyone here from the most wealthy merchant to the most humble slave appears to be human as well as caught in an immensely complicated situation that shows that slavery, or something like it, was essential for the freedom mankind has sought to grasp over the last 250 years of human history. We all must therefore grapple between the bind that increasing personal freedom often only increases our vicious oppression of others around us, while removing us from the comforting connections we have to others, connections that this book is quick to point out for many of the people within it.
Ultimately, this is a work that shows a great deal of attention to many aspects of history. In particular, I must single out the author for praise in terms of his dedication to archival work, as well as the subtle work of literary criticism in untangling the works of Herman Melville, Benito Cerreño, Neruda, Borges, and Delano (a distant relative of three US presidents, most notably FDR). I am not familiar with the author’s other works (he appears to be something of a specialist in obscure but interesting South American history that relates to American capitalism), and some aspects of the author’s worldview are at least questionable, but as a historian whose work provokes a reader to thought and to wrestling with timeless and deep and relevant philosophical matters, including the tangling questions of what it means to be free, this is a work that I must highly recommend, even if it is not a particularly lighthearted work, among its difficulties showing how the rise of modern capitalism and debt has made many into slaves in some fashion, and that merely traveling around the world footloose and fancy free does not make one free of the torments of the mind. No, this book is not lighthearted in the least.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
The incident at the heart of this book is the ironic class between Amasa Delana, an antislavery New England sealer seeking economic freedom in a situation of ecological collapse, and a ship of rebellious slaves full of partly-Muslim West Africans led by people named Bobo and Mori who had killed most of the whites on the boat but had the boat’s pilot/owner Benito Cerreño piloting them to what they think is freedom. The end result for the slaves is the fate that awaited many of the whites on the boat, a gruesome death. That said, none of the people here make it out particularly happily, and the incident itself became the basis for a significant story by Herman Melville. The repercussions of this story include a look at Islam and Catholicism in Spain and West Africa, the roots of slavery and insurance law, piracy, the complex interply between free trade and human degradation, the literature of Melville and his contemporaries, the relationship between racial and social politics in the United States and Latin America, slave results, and a wide variety of other details. The author himself appears a bit too favorable to Islam, which is a notable flaw given the fact that Islam is one of the main forces of reactionary and inhumane behaviors in the contemporary world, but for the most part this is a thoughtful book that seeks both to provoke the reader into a deep examination of the tensions at the base of our world but also to point out the essential humanity of all of the people involved, regardless of their social position.
Truthfully, no one comes out of this story looking particularly heroic, not the slaves who rise up from their oppression only to become brutal murderers who feign servility in order to avoid their just desserts, not the Spanish and American merchants and judges who combine an interest in free trade (whether through smuggling or piracy or legal means) mainly as a way to be free of regulation from above even as they increasingly regulate those below them, not antislavery New England merchants whose wealth and profits are increasingly tied to environmental degradation as well as the slave trade, nor Spanish imperialists whose weakness in dealing with the French as well as restive colonials lead them to fail in their duties to protect the people they govern, nor in the ordinary men and women whose role in the slave trade appears to have been made for either social advancement or to try to keep from falling further down the social ladder, often with tragic results. Though no one looks particularly heroic, everyone here from the most wealthy merchant to the most humble slave appears to be human as well as caught in an immensely complicated situation that shows that slavery, or something like it, was essential for the freedom mankind has sought to grasp over the last 250 years of human history. We all must therefore grapple between the bind that increasing personal freedom often only increases our vicious oppression of others around us, while removing us from the comforting connections we have to others, connections that this book is quick to point out for many of the people within it.
Ultimately, this is a work that shows a great deal of attention to many aspects of history. In particular, I must single out the author for praise in terms of his dedication to archival work, as well as the subtle work of literary criticism in untangling the works of Herman Melville, Benito Cerreño, Neruda, Borges, and Delano (a distant relative of three US presidents, most notably FDR). I am not familiar with the author’s other works (he appears to be something of a specialist in obscure but interesting South American history that relates to American capitalism), and some aspects of the author’s worldview are at least questionable, but as a historian whose work provokes a reader to thought and to wrestling with timeless and deep and relevant philosophical matters, including the tangling questions of what it means to be free, this is a work that I must highly recommend, even if it is not a particularly lighthearted work, among its difficulties showing how the rise of modern capitalism and debt has made many into slaves in some fashion, and that merely traveling around the world footloose and fancy free does not make one free of the torments of the mind. No, this book is not lighthearted in the least.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
October 1, 2022
UThis was very good and, by the end, riveting. Grandin wrote this book because he wanted to plumb deeper into Herman Meville's novel Benito Cereno, a story about a real historical American sea captain who encounters a ship that has been seized by the slaves held captive on board. But he goes quite a bit further here. Grandin uses this incident of revolt on a slave ship and its suppression and aftermath as a lens into the broader conditions and contradictions of the early 19th century and the decades to follow. He gives us a far-reaching tour touching on the northeast US, the Atlantic mercantile routes, the Spanish Empire in South America, West Africa, and more. We learn about the horrors of the middle passage, the dangerous economics and environmental catastrophe of sealing, and the contradictions of Enlightenment liberal capitalism in a world run on slavery. You'll be able to get a strong sense not only of what happened and where but also what it was like.
This book will also help wrench you out of your American exceptionalism by demonstrating that the Spanish Empire was much more like the US at the time that many would care to admit: utterly slave-dependent and in many places just as taken with liberalism.
Some very powerful sections of this book are places where Grandin gets a bit more speculative and philosophical: how the journey across plains in South America may have reminded slaves being forcibly marched of their native West Africa; how Melville and Darwin both pondered the vertigo of a materialist account of the world that radically decentered humanity; how Amasa Delano, the anti-protagonist of this book, is both in Melville's fictionalized account and in actual history an avatar of the banal workings of capitalism that generate horrors equal to or surpassing the violent irrationality of figures like Melville's Ahab, often seen as an avatar or prediction of totalitarian fascism. This book shows that history focused on a particular set of people outside of a period's main cast of powerful and famous figures can be just as or even more illuminating than history that focuses on major events and trends. Great stuff.
This book will also help wrench you out of your American exceptionalism by demonstrating that the Spanish Empire was much more like the US at the time that many would care to admit: utterly slave-dependent and in many places just as taken with liberalism.
Some very powerful sections of this book are places where Grandin gets a bit more speculative and philosophical: how the journey across plains in South America may have reminded slaves being forcibly marched of their native West Africa; how Melville and Darwin both pondered the vertigo of a materialist account of the world that radically decentered humanity; how Amasa Delano, the anti-protagonist of this book, is both in Melville's fictionalized account and in actual history an avatar of the banal workings of capitalism that generate horrors equal to or surpassing the violent irrationality of figures like Melville's Ahab, often seen as an avatar or prediction of totalitarian fascism. This book shows that history focused on a particular set of people outside of a period's main cast of powerful and famous figures can be just as or even more illuminating than history that focuses on major events and trends. Great stuff.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 3, 2014
There is a great read and incredibly rich in historical detail. It illustrates very well how we delude ourselves to feel good about who we are, and provide religious justification, even as we do flagitious things to other human beings. The enormity (no: that does not mean immenseness) of the slave trade is difficult to comprehend.
During the "Age of Freedom," "the act effectively define d freedom as the freedom of white men to enslave black men, women, and children" (p. 270). "In the South, too, defenders of slavery were saying public what many of them believed in private, that freedom required slavery, that slavery was, in the words of the South Carolinian John Calhoun, a 'positive good,' the foundation 'free and stable political institutions.'" (p. 270 - 271).
It confirms that the early 1800s were part of the Middle Ages. The author seems to agree (p. 69) that the beginning of "modern times" was a gradual process between 1750 and 1850, and that the idea that the Middle Ages ended ~ 1500 is a Renaissance Humanist conceit that does withstand critical examination.
Near the end of his life Amasa Delano asks his brother Samuel, "Let me ask you," he went on "who has made you so extremely unhappy in this world but Christians. Consider if any Chinese, Sandwich Islanders, or any other Islanders, has ever don you much wrong, where there was no Christian . . . mixed with it."
The April 2014 selection for The Mostly New York Book Club: we were in Istanbul, so we missed the discussion. The thirty-ninth book I have finished this year.
Introduction.
p. 6. 1804 was also the year Haiti declared itself free, establishing the second republic in the Americas and the first ever, anywhere, born of a slave rebellion
Part I Fast Fish
The ongoing struggle against hereditary monarchy is apparent on p. 13. It is 1804 and the Middle Ages, characterized by hereditary monarchy, are coming to an end.
The end of "mercantilism," through "Spanish America's market revolution, on p. 24 to 26, is another sign of the gradual end of the Middle ages between 1750 and 1850.
p. 25. The city of Buenos Aries was conceived in corruption.
There were still (p. 29) commercial guilds in the early 1800s: it is still the Middle Ages.
p. 32. "In the name of humanity," Mordeille implored, in language the viceroy later said the thought exaggerated, "I ask permission to sell the slaves."
p. 39. Slave slave ships could be smelled from miles away.
p. 42. . . . including the captain, had begun to regain some of their vision. But thirty-nine Africans hadn't, so before entering the harbor the captain decided to drown them, tying weights to their legs and throwing them overboard. The ship was insured and their loss would be covered.
p. 46. The doctors, however, didn't extend the logic of their own reasoning to condemn the slave trade.
Part II A Loose Fish
p. 68. Like many other republicans of his day, Delano made a distinction between ambition and envy. Envy was a vice, ambition was a virtue, a force for self-improvement, a way to better one's self and one's community. Had Delano been envious, he might have responded to the increasingly divided Duxbury by turning inward and demanding a leveling of wealth. Instead he struck outward, believing that he could fulfill his ambition by enlarging his world.
p. 69. Like some republican Zelig, Delano witnessed, or came close to witnessing, many of the most storied episodes that mark the start of modern times.
This author would agree that the end of the Middle Ages was a gradual process between 1750 and 1850?
p. 74. - despite the fact that a few in town were getting richer, and many other were becoming poorer.
Part III The New Extreme
Part IV Further
Part V If God Wills
p. 184. According to one study, 493 slave ship revolts took place between 1509 and 1869. The actual number is at least twice that, since . . .
How could Amasa Delano have so unsuspecting?
p. 188. But, importantly, Catholic theologians didn't argue that the goal of their guerra buena - good war - was the conversion of Muslims. Rather, they legitimated the reconquista as a just retaking of territory rightfully Christian (since the Visigoths had accepted Christ before the Arabs arrived).
p. 190. . . . its monopoly right to American was defended as a spiritual mission to save Native American souls.
p. 196. Though the former slave colony had declared independence in 1804, it would take more than half a century before the United States would recognize the country. Washington would receive no "black ambassadors," said Missouri senator, since to do so would be to honor the murders of "masters and mistresses."
Part VI Who Ain't a Slave?
p. 205. Already, though, British officials were concerned about the promiscuous slaughter of adult seals, which was leaving pups to starve to death on the beach by the thousands. If the market price had been high enough, it would have been worth it to kill young seals, since their small patches of fur could be used to make wallets and gloves.
p. 206. . . . kidnapping indigenous women from Tasmania to keep as slave wives.
p. 215. As did Christians, Muslim philosophers and clerics worked to reconcile their humanism - the idea that all could be saved, that, as a fourteenth-century Muslim jurist said, "the basic principle for all children of Adam is freedom" - with the practice of slavery.
p. 221. Benito Cerreno, who was on deck listening, "considered the ship and what was in here as lost," Delano said. That meant it was a prize for the taking, which he calculated was worth tens of thousands of pesos. "If we should take her, it should be all our own."
p. 222. They had been tortured. Some had been disemboweled and were writhing in their viscera. Others had had the skin on the backs and thighs shaved off.
Part 7 General Average
p. 244. And there is at least on infamous case, that of the Zong in 1781,where slave ship owners claimed that the jettisoning of 132 Africans was necessary to save the rest of the slaves and crew because the ship wasn't carrying enough food toe cover its journey across the Atlantic.
p. 258. But for the hapless Delano, faith in reason and free will became its own enchantment, blinding him to the ties that bound men together, that set the limits of who succeeded and who failed, and that decided who was free and who wasn't.
Epilogue: Herman Melville's America
Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom for a while Melville considered the darkest and deepest ponders of the human condition American had yet produced, wrote with a naive nostalgia that the southern master an slave "dwelt together in greater peace and affection . . . than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf."
During the "Age of Freedom," "the act effectively define d freedom as the freedom of white men to enslave black men, women, and children" (p. 270). "In the South, too, defenders of slavery were saying public what many of them believed in private, that freedom required slavery, that slavery was, in the words of the South Carolinian John Calhoun, a 'positive good,' the foundation 'free and stable political institutions.'" (p. 270 - 271).
It confirms that the early 1800s were part of the Middle Ages. The author seems to agree (p. 69) that the beginning of "modern times" was a gradual process between 1750 and 1850, and that the idea that the Middle Ages ended ~ 1500 is a Renaissance Humanist conceit that does withstand critical examination.
Near the end of his life Amasa Delano asks his brother Samuel, "Let me ask you," he went on "who has made you so extremely unhappy in this world but Christians. Consider if any Chinese, Sandwich Islanders, or any other Islanders, has ever don you much wrong, where there was no Christian . . . mixed with it."
The April 2014 selection for The Mostly New York Book Club: we were in Istanbul, so we missed the discussion. The thirty-ninth book I have finished this year.
Introduction.
p. 6. 1804 was also the year Haiti declared itself free, establishing the second republic in the Americas and the first ever, anywhere, born of a slave rebellion
Part I Fast Fish
The ongoing struggle against hereditary monarchy is apparent on p. 13. It is 1804 and the Middle Ages, characterized by hereditary monarchy, are coming to an end.
The end of "mercantilism," through "Spanish America's market revolution, on p. 24 to 26, is another sign of the gradual end of the Middle ages between 1750 and 1850.
p. 25. The city of Buenos Aries was conceived in corruption.
There were still (p. 29) commercial guilds in the early 1800s: it is still the Middle Ages.
p. 32. "In the name of humanity," Mordeille implored, in language the viceroy later said the thought exaggerated, "I ask permission to sell the slaves."
p. 39. Slave slave ships could be smelled from miles away.
p. 42. . . . including the captain, had begun to regain some of their vision. But thirty-nine Africans hadn't, so before entering the harbor the captain decided to drown them, tying weights to their legs and throwing them overboard. The ship was insured and their loss would be covered.
p. 46. The doctors, however, didn't extend the logic of their own reasoning to condemn the slave trade.
Part II A Loose Fish
p. 68. Like many other republicans of his day, Delano made a distinction between ambition and envy. Envy was a vice, ambition was a virtue, a force for self-improvement, a way to better one's self and one's community. Had Delano been envious, he might have responded to the increasingly divided Duxbury by turning inward and demanding a leveling of wealth. Instead he struck outward, believing that he could fulfill his ambition by enlarging his world.
p. 69. Like some republican Zelig, Delano witnessed, or came close to witnessing, many of the most storied episodes that mark the start of modern times.
This author would agree that the end of the Middle Ages was a gradual process between 1750 and 1850?
p. 74. - despite the fact that a few in town were getting richer, and many other were becoming poorer.
Part III The New Extreme
Part IV Further
Part V If God Wills
p. 184. According to one study, 493 slave ship revolts took place between 1509 and 1869. The actual number is at least twice that, since . . .
How could Amasa Delano have so unsuspecting?
p. 188. But, importantly, Catholic theologians didn't argue that the goal of their guerra buena - good war - was the conversion of Muslims. Rather, they legitimated the reconquista as a just retaking of territory rightfully Christian (since the Visigoths had accepted Christ before the Arabs arrived).
p. 190. . . . its monopoly right to American was defended as a spiritual mission to save Native American souls.
p. 196. Though the former slave colony had declared independence in 1804, it would take more than half a century before the United States would recognize the country. Washington would receive no "black ambassadors," said Missouri senator, since to do so would be to honor the murders of "masters and mistresses."
Part VI Who Ain't a Slave?
p. 205. Already, though, British officials were concerned about the promiscuous slaughter of adult seals, which was leaving pups to starve to death on the beach by the thousands. If the market price had been high enough, it would have been worth it to kill young seals, since their small patches of fur could be used to make wallets and gloves.
p. 206. . . . kidnapping indigenous women from Tasmania to keep as slave wives.
p. 215. As did Christians, Muslim philosophers and clerics worked to reconcile their humanism - the idea that all could be saved, that, as a fourteenth-century Muslim jurist said, "the basic principle for all children of Adam is freedom" - with the practice of slavery.
p. 221. Benito Cerreno, who was on deck listening, "considered the ship and what was in here as lost," Delano said. That meant it was a prize for the taking, which he calculated was worth tens of thousands of pesos. "If we should take her, it should be all our own."
p. 222. They had been tortured. Some had been disemboweled and were writhing in their viscera. Others had had the skin on the backs and thighs shaved off.
Part 7 General Average
p. 244. And there is at least on infamous case, that of the Zong in 1781,where slave ship owners claimed that the jettisoning of 132 Africans was necessary to save the rest of the slaves and crew because the ship wasn't carrying enough food toe cover its journey across the Atlantic.
p. 258. But for the hapless Delano, faith in reason and free will became its own enchantment, blinding him to the ties that bound men together, that set the limits of who succeeded and who failed, and that decided who was free and who wasn't.
Epilogue: Herman Melville's America
Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom for a while Melville considered the darkest and deepest ponders of the human condition American had yet produced, wrote with a naive nostalgia that the southern master an slave "dwelt together in greater peace and affection . . . than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf."
April 23, 2018
The book is based on a single event that lasted for a day, a slave revolt on a ship off the coast of Chile in 1805. We follow the journeys of the key figures that led to their meeting. And throughout the journeys, the author skillfully elaborates on the historical background, creating a wide spider web of commitments, motives, and circumstances that address the weighty themes of slavery and excessive capitalism.
Most of what we know about the event, whose details are debated, comes from the auto-biographical journal of Amasa Delano, a late eighteenth-century sea captain from New England who stopped the revolt. The other story-line follows the West-African slaves who suffered through a harsh journey to the other side of the world in chains. Learning about the slavery in the Southern hemisphere opened my eyes further to the scale of the trade and it's nuances in different parts of the world. Slavery is arguably the biggest stain in human history, and it's tied to the rise of excessive capitalism that inevitably appears in other parts of the book (e.g. seal hunting). My interpretation is that capitalism in itself is not a bad thing. But the original intent was lost in the relentless pursuit of possession. We warped it, developing a 'necessity' that spawned the subjugation of other humans.
The book frequently references Henry Melville's Benito Cereno, a fictionalized account of the same event that was published in 1855. Perhaps it's a gentlemanly tip of the hat to an inspiration, but I didn't feel it added any context and served only to draw out certain parts of the book. However, the author does tie it up nicely in the end.
"Seeking to conquer a larger liberty, man but extends the empire of necessity." -Henry Melville
Most of what we know about the event, whose details are debated, comes from the auto-biographical journal of Amasa Delano, a late eighteenth-century sea captain from New England who stopped the revolt. The other story-line follows the West-African slaves who suffered through a harsh journey to the other side of the world in chains. Learning about the slavery in the Southern hemisphere opened my eyes further to the scale of the trade and it's nuances in different parts of the world. Slavery is arguably the biggest stain in human history, and it's tied to the rise of excessive capitalism that inevitably appears in other parts of the book (e.g. seal hunting). My interpretation is that capitalism in itself is not a bad thing. But the original intent was lost in the relentless pursuit of possession. We warped it, developing a 'necessity' that spawned the subjugation of other humans.
The book frequently references Henry Melville's Benito Cereno, a fictionalized account of the same event that was published in 1855. Perhaps it's a gentlemanly tip of the hat to an inspiration, but I didn't feel it added any context and served only to draw out certain parts of the book. However, the author does tie it up nicely in the end.
"Seeking to conquer a larger liberty, man but extends the empire of necessity." -Henry Melville
March 26, 2019
Książka Grega Grandina, profesora historii na Uniwersytecie Nowego Jorku, opatrzona podtytułem "Niewolnictwo, wolność i oszustwo w Nowym Świecie", mierzy się z paradoksem czasów przełomu, kiedy wiek XVIII, wiek oświeceniowych filozofów i oświeconych monarchii, przechodzi w zrywie rewolucji w wiek XIX, wiek postępu i moralności. U jej podstaw tkwi pytanie, jak to możliwe, że wolność jednych nie przekłada się na wolność wszystkich, jak to możliwe, że rewolucja francuska i rewolucja amerykańska, obie skupione właśnie na wolności, przyniosły w rezultacie krwawą wojnę na San Domingo i niemal wiek niewolnictwa w najbardziej wolnej z republik. Drugim wątkiem, powracającym przez całą narrację, jest rodząca się globalizacja, współzależność handlu niewolnikami w Afryce z plantacjami cukru w Indiach Zachodnich, wielorybnictwem i polowaniem na foki. Ta właśnie współzależność tworzy imperium konieczności, zaklęty krąg, z którego nikt nie może się wyłamać, ponieważ zerwanie jednego ogniwa łańcucha pociągnie za sobą upadek wszystkich.
Bardzo ciekawe jest podejście do tematu. Punktem wyjścia jest mało znana powieść Hermana Melville'a, zatytułowana "Benito Cerreno", opowiadająca o autentycznym wydarzeniu z 1805 roku. Dwa statki, amerykański i peruwiański spotykają się u wybrzeży Chile. Peruwiański wyraźnie ma kłopoty, więc kapitan Amasa Delano płynie z zapasami na jego pokład. Przyjmuje go kapitan Benito Cerreno w towarzystwie czarnego służącego, wylewnie dziękuje za pomoc i zapewnia, że wszystko jest w jak najlepszym porządku. Ale kiedy szalupa z kapitanem Delano odpływa, Cerreno nagle skacze do niej z pokładu
Do lektury reszty recenzji zapraszam na blog https://kornikksiazkowy.blogspot.com/...
Bardzo ciekawe jest podejście do tematu. Punktem wyjścia jest mało znana powieść Hermana Melville'a, zatytułowana "Benito Cerreno", opowiadająca o autentycznym wydarzeniu z 1805 roku. Dwa statki, amerykański i peruwiański spotykają się u wybrzeży Chile. Peruwiański wyraźnie ma kłopoty, więc kapitan Amasa Delano płynie z zapasami na jego pokład. Przyjmuje go kapitan Benito Cerreno w towarzystwie czarnego służącego, wylewnie dziękuje za pomoc i zapewnia, że wszystko jest w jak najlepszym porządku. Ale kiedy szalupa z kapitanem Delano odpływa, Cerreno nagle skacze do niej z pokładu
Do lektury reszty recenzji zapraszam na blog https://kornikksiazkowy.blogspot.com/...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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