Horrors of Slavery announced an abolitionist politics unacknowledged by Romantic-era antislavery activists: place-based, self-liberation initiated and led by Black women. Reworking the abolitionist figure of the sorrowful, enslaved Black mother, Wedderburn celebrated his mother, Rosanna, who demanded that his enslaver father manumit him, and championed his grandmother, Talkee Amy, as a higgler and obeah woman who “trafficked on her own account.” Similar freedom practices are then traced throughout The History of Mary Prince. Prince’s repeated petit marronage demanded enslavers’ acknowledgment of her kinship with her parents and husband. As a higgler, like Talkee Amy, Prince used the produce from the provision grounds to assert freedom in fugitive markets. Wedderburn and Prince’s life narratives brought stories of Black women’s place-based freedom practices to a white audience.

Robert Wedderburn was deeply influenced by his enslaved mother and grandmother, who raised him in Jamaica. After migrating to London, he became a key figure in ultraradical circles and was prosecuted by the British government for blasphemous libel. Wedderburn’s vision for abolition from below sought to forge a transatlantic alliance between English agrarian radicals and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Wedderburn’s influence was documented in Robert Cruikshank’s caricature, A Peep in the London Tavern, which depicted him challenging the proto-socialist Robert Owen. After a review of existing scholarship that places Wedderburn within ultraradical circles or focuses on his mixed-race identity, the Introduction argues that understanding Wedderburn’s advocacy for land-based insurrection requires dialogue with scholarship in Black geographies. Wedderburn’s insights about place-based resistance to slavery are then illustrated in a reading of James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica.

“Black Ecological Insurgencies” charts the formation of an insurgent ecological tradition in the Tidewater of Virginia from slavery through the emergence of Jim Crow, underscoring the relationship between these formations and the re-grounding of Black subjectivity within the Black body in contrast to the latter’s abstraction and extraction in the service of expropriation and accumulation associated with plantation and post-emancipation transformations of the landscape. Engaging court documents, bills of sale, slave narratives, state records related to the consolidation of fisheries, as well as historical newspapers articles and related images, I excavate the dynamic relation between Black collective self-creation, fugitivity, resistance, land and aquacultural cultivation, and the rejoining of Black subjectivity and embodiment outside the premises of fungibility and disposability.

This introductory chapter unpacks and integrates the study’s key concepts, theories, and fields to situate the analyses laid out in subsequent chapters. It devotes detailed attention to the inextricable and co-constitutive relationships linking societies, environments, and power. It connects Afro-Brazilian cultures with the myths of racial democracy that helped to shape their emergence in the twentieth century. It discusses concepts of cultural landscapes within economies of transatlantic exchange, and links theories of relational power with Afro-Brazilian resistance and environmental change. It frames the colonial plantation and its monocultures as the ongoing socioecological framework of coloniality, in contrast to the complex biodiverse palm oil landscapes of Northeast Brazil. Along the way, the chapter introduces the real and conceptual places involved in the study, and their interrelations, especially Bahia, the Atlantic World, and the African diaspora. It concludes with a discussion of methods and methodology and an outline of the book’s structure.