Slavery

Donald J. Trump has sparked some soul- searching among US historians: has this happened before? Does it mean America has changed? Cue the self-laceration, cue the book deals. Two impressive volumes illustrate both agreement and disagreement, both concurring that America represents the search for something — but the jury’s out as to precisely what. Capitalism in America: A History is by an Economist writer (Adrian Wooldridge) and a former chair of the Federal Reserve (Alan Greenspan), so you can guess where they’re coming from. The book celebrates the American thirst for self-improvement and argues that the country has long benefited from a ‘creative destruction’ driven by the market and entrepreneurs. Here’s the story.

It’s 1830, and among the sugar cane of Faith Plantation in Barbados, suicide seems like the only way out. Decapitations and burnings are performed with languorous cruelty. Women give birth and are sent straight back to work after lying their ‘tender-skinned newborns down in the furrows to wail against the hot sun’. Esi Edugyan’s third novel does not retreat to softer ground after her last, Half-Blood Blues, dealt with Nazi ideology. Both Germany and Barbados have chapters in their histories when humans were treated like mere creatures. Hope arrives with the plantation master’s brother, Christopher ‘Titch’ Wilde, a scientist, inventor and abolitionist. Titch chooses a slave boy, George Washington Black, to be his apprentice.

As the great Bossa Nova musician Tom Jobim liked to say, Brazil is not for beginners. This tends to be the case for biographies too: an admiration for the protagonist comes first. But once one has a taste for the flair, language and music of Brazil, the extraordinary tale of the pressure cooker that forged it heaves into view. Five centuries of pharaonic boldness and brutality meander through this hefty tome. In relating the events that shaped Brazil’s vast and unlikely realm, the authors seek to dispel the ‘fairytale’ myths that continue to distort reality. Take cachaça, Brazil’s national liquor. The reader may consume it in a genteel setting in a caipirinha cocktail.

Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the Victorian era in Gillespie and I, and now, a young slave in this third novel. Disenfranchised they may be, but her protagonists don’t lack agency. The narrator of Sugar Money is Lucien, a slave who is barely in his teens and whose voice is startlingly optimistic. In Martinique in 1765, Lucien and his older brother, Emile, are tasked by their French master with returning to Grenada — where they once lived — and smuggling back 42 slaves who are living under the rule of English invaders at a hospital plantation in Fort Royal. Emile is realistic about the scale of the challenge, but Lucien views it as a great adventure.

It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the odd one might have heard of Benjamin Lay. In many ways this is understandable enough, but if anyone deserves to muscle in on the mildly self-congratulatory and largely middle-class pantheon of Abolitionist Saints, it is the gloriously improbable and largely forgotten Quaker throwback and hero of Marcus Rediker’s generous and absorbing act — his own phrase — of ‘retrospective justice’. There was probably only one period of English history in which Lay would have found himself at home, and that period, along with all the hopes and aspirations it had given birth to, had ended 20 years before he was born.