Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World

Illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic world

By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave socie...