Episode 16: Master and Commander with Mary Hicks

This week Mary Hicks and I dig into life at sea with Master and Commander (2003). This is one of my favorite films and a movie I love to teach with. Mary is a scholar of the Black Atlantic and knows far more about the slave trade and life onboard these ships than I could ever hope to learn. We're talking about the Napoleonic Wars, Crowe and Bettany, and Mary's work focusing in on the experiences of enslaved and freed Africans in the Portuguese part of the transatlantic slave trade.

About our guest:
Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.

More broadly, she seeks to interrogate the multiplicity of connections between West Africa and Brazil through the lens of mutual cultural, technological, commercial, intellectual and environmental influences and redefine how historians understand experiences of enslavement and the middle passage. In addition to investigating the lives of African sailors, she also explores the cultural and religious sensibilities of enslaved and freed African women in living in 19th century Salvador da Bahia. Along these lines, her second book will detail the emergence and elaboration of new gendered and racialized subjectivities in the wake of Portugal’s initiation of trade with West Africa in the fifteenth century.