Description
Book SynopsisIlluminates 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 societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events.
In Poisoned Relations, Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one's relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational n
