In Reckoning with Slavery Jennifer L. Morgan draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African
women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions
of trade race and commodification in the Black Atlantic. From capture to transport to sale to
childbirth these women were demographically counted as commodities during the Middle Passage
vulnerable to rape separated from their kin at slave markets and subject to laws that
enslaved their children upon birth. In this way they were central to the binding of
reproductive labor with kinship racial hierarchy and the economics of slavery. Throughout
this groundbreaking study Morgan demonstrates that the development of Western notions of value
and race occurred simultaneously. In so doing she illustrates how racial capitalism denied the
enslaved their kinship and affective ties while simultaneously relying on kinship to reproduce
and enforce slavery through enslaved female bodies.
