SLAVERY, FREEDOM, and DECEPTION in the NEW WORLD
by GREG GRANDIN
The story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates the dark side of the Age of Liberty:
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 who appeared to be 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 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 savage violence.
Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity is the untold history of this extraordinary event and its bloody aftermath. With the same gripping storytelling that won praise for his Fordlandia, historian Greg Grandin tracks the West Africans through the horrors of the Middle Passage and their forced march from the Argentine pampas to the cold, high Andes, providing a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas. He also follows Delano as he sails the Pacific to kill seals, part of a generation of mariners who were setting up the United States’ first informal island colonies — their slide from benevolence to barbarism an expression of the human exploitation and environmental destruction that marked the early years of American expansion.
Delano’s blindness that day has already inspired one masterpiece — Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. Now Grandin returns to the event to paint an indelible portrait of a world in the throes of revolution, of people — slaves, sailors, and sealers — trying to claim the promise of freedom, law, and reason only to find that the shackles of slavery were not so easily cast off.
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“The Empire of Necessity is scholarship at its best. Greg Grandin’s deft penetration into the marrow of the slave industry is compelling, brilliant and necessary.”
TONI MORRISON
“Rooted in an event known primarily through the genius of Herman Melville’s transcendent Benito Cereno, Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity is a stunning work of research done all over the rims of two oceans, as well as beautiful, withering storytelling. This is a harrowing story of Muslim Africans trekking across South America, and ultimately a unique window onto the nature of the slave trade, the maritime worlds of the early nineteenth century, the lives lived in between slavery and freedom all over the Americas, and even the ocean-inspired imagination of Melville. Grandin is a master of grand history with new insights.”
DAVID W. BLIGHT, author of A SLAVE NO MORE
“In this multifaceted masterpiece, Greg Grandin excavates the relentlessly fascinating history of a slave revolt to mine the enduring dilemmas of politics and identity in a New World where the Age of Freedom was also the Age of Slavery. This is that rare book in which the drama of ideas are equally measured, a work of history and of literary reflection that is as urgent as it is timely.”
PHILIP GOUREVITCH, author of THE BALLAD OF ABU GHRAIB
“Greg Grandin has done it again. Starting with a single dramatic encounter in the South Pacific he has shown us an entire world: of multiple continents, terrible bondage and the dream of freedom. This is also a story of how one episode changed the lives of a sea captain and a great writer from the other end of the earth. An extraordinary tale, beautifully told.”
ADAM HOCHSCHILD, author of KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST
from the jacket