Walter Hawthorne
Professor and chairperson of MSU’s Department of History | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Expert in African history, history of slavery and slave trade
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Biography
Walter Hawthorne is a Professor of African History and Chair of the History Department. His areas research specialization are Upper Guinea, the Atlantic, and Brazil. He is particularly interested in the history of slavery and the slave trade. Much of his research has focused on African agricultural practices, religious beliefs, and family structures in the Old and New Worlds. Hawthorne's first book, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Heinemann: 2003), explores the impact of interactions with the Atlantic, and particularly slave trading, on small-scale, decentralized societies. His most recent book, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade 1600-1830 (Cambridge: 2010), examines the slave trade from Upper Guinea to Amazonia Brazil. Hawthorne has published in a range of scholarly journals such as Journal of African History, Luso-Brazilian Review, Slavery and Abolition, Africa, Journal of Global History, and American Historical Review.
He is heavily involved in digital scholarship and has partnered with MATRIX, MSU’s digital humanities center, for a number of projects. They recently completed work on a British-Library funded archival digitization project in The Gambia. Documents from the project are available online. They have an ongoing NEH-sponsored project titled Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network, which is an online database with information about the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. Another NEH-sponsored project that to which Hawthorne is a central Islam and Modernity.
Industry Expertise (3)
Writing and Editing
Education/Learning
Research
Areas of Expertise (5)
The Slave Trade
Brazil
Upper Guinea
Atlantic
The History of Slavery
Education (3)
Stanford University: Ph.D., History 1998
University of Maryland: M.A., History 1992
Hampden-Sydney College: B.A., History and Economics 1988
Affiliations (1)
- MATRIX
Links (2)
News (4)
Who were America’s enslaved? A new database humanizes the names behind the numbers
Smithsonian online
2020-12-11
Funded through a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Enslaved.org—described by its creators as a “linked open data platform” featuring information on people, events and places involved in the transatlantic slave trade—marks the culmination of almost ten years of work by Williams and fellow principal investigators Walter Hawthorne, a historian at Michigan State University, and Dean Rehberger, director of Michigan State’s Matrix Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences. Originally, the team conceived Enslaved.org as a space to simply house these different datasets, from baptismal records to runaway ads, ship manifests, bills of sale and emancipation documents. But, as Rehberger explains, “It became a project about how we can get datasets to interact with one another so that you can draw broader conclusions about slavery. … We’re going in there and grabbing all that data and trying to make sense of it, not just give [users] a whole long list of things.”
MSU uses $1.5m Mellon Foundation grant to build massive slave trade database
MSU Today online
2018-01-09
Michigan State University, supported by nearly $1.5 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will create a unique online data hub that will change the way scholars and the public understand African slavery.
Seven MSU graduate programs rank no. 1 nationally
MSU Today online
2017-03-14
Two more Michigan State University graduate programs – African history and supply chain – claimed top spots in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings, giving MSU seven No. 1 programs across a broad range of disciplines.
Faculty voice: Walter Hawthorne: African history at MSU
360 Perspective online
2017-03-14
Walter Hawthorne is a professor of African history and chairman of the Department of History. His areas of research specialization are Upper Guinea, the Atlantic and Brazil.
Journal Articles (5)
The historical roots of multicultural unity along the Upper Guinea Coast and in Guinea-Bissau
Social Dynamics
Walter Hawthorne & José Lingna Nafafé
2016 Lusofonia or lusophony is often defined as an identity shared by people in areas that were once colonised by Portugal, which in Africa include Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe. Lusofonia assumes that in these places people share something – a language, certainly, but also a history and culture rooted in the Iberian Peninsula. In some ways it is a re-articulation of Gilberto Freyre’s lusotropicalismo, the idea that Portuguese were more adaptable than other Europeans to tropical climates and cultures and created more multicultural colonial communities. Those who espouse lusofonia often have a political agenda – the strengthening of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries. In this article, we argue that, like lusotropicalismo, lusofonia is a dream; it is not rooted in a historical reality. It is luso-centric in that it ignores the power and persistence of local cultures and gives undue weight to Portuguese influence. With regard to Africa, lusofonia’s agenda is elite driven and assumes the inevitability of modernity and globalisation. And we demonstrate that it was through Upper Guinean institutions and languages, and not colonial ones, that community and fellowship were most commonly fostered in the past, as they are fostered today. Those seeking the roots of lusofonia cannot, then, look to this period of Portuguese–African engagement in Upper Guinea. There Portuguese embraced “black ways.” They operated in a peculiar multicultural space in which people possessed fluid and flexible identities. Portugal did not create that space. Lusofonia has not been the foundation for cultural unity. Rather, unity has been found in localised institutions and in Crioulo. In Guinea-Bissau, lusofonia is not an indigenous movement. If it is anything, it is the stuff of elites and foreigners and is not rooted in any historical reality.
“Sendo agora, como se fôssemos, uma família”: laços entre companheiros de viagem no navio negreiro Emília, no Rio de Janeiro e através do Mundo Atlântico
Revista Mundos do Trabalho
Walter Hawthorne
2011 This article analyzes the lives of a group of Africans from a slave ship, the Emilia. The ship was seizedby the British frigate Morgiana in 1821 and taken to Rio de Janeiro. There, it was condemned by the British andPortuguese mixed commission court for illegal slave trading. The recaptives from the Emilia became “liberatedAfricans” and remained under the custody of the local government for fourteen years. They were distributedamong public institutions and private hirers to serve as “free laborers”. In practice, their labor experiences wereclose to slavery. After fourteen years, a group of the Africans from the Emilia went back to Africa together. Thearticle claims that rather than an ethnic identity, the most important bond among them was the identity theycreated during the middle passage on board the Emília, a shipmate identity.
Gorge: An African Seaman and his Flights from ‘Freedom’ back to ‘Slavery’ in the Early Nineteenth Century
Slavery & Abolition
Walter Hawthorne
2010 This essay uses records from one slave's testimony before the Mixed Commission in Rio de Janeiro, along with supporting documents from archives in Lisbon and London, to trace a slave seaman's Atlantic adventures. Two ships upon which the seaman - Gorge - labored were captured by British anti-slaving squadrons. British officials presented Gorge with chances to obtain legal ‘freedom’, first in Freetown and then in Rio. Both times he chose to remain a slave in Brazil. Gorge's choice of slavery reveals much about the limited meanings of slavery and freedom for Africans in Atlantic communities and about the maritime identities that some slaves forged on ships in the era of Atlantic slavery.
From “Black Rice” to “Brown”: Rethinking the History of Risiculture in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Atlantic
The American Historical Review
Walter Hawthorne
2010 IN THE DECEMBER 2007 ISSUE of this journal and in the first major piece of scholarship to make use of the recently launched second version of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD2), David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson challenge what has come to be known as the “black rice thesis.”1 Developed over several decades by Peter H. Wood, Daniel C. Littlefield, and Judith A. Carney, the thesis posits that skilled rice farmers from Upper Guinea introduced technology important for the establishment and expansion of lowland South Carolina and Georgia's eighteenth-century rice-based plantation system.2 Carney extends the argument by applying it elsewhere, including Maranhão, Brazil.3 Underlying Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson's challenge are two assertions. First, they state that most of the Africans shipped to South Carolina, Georgia, and Amazonia (by which they mean the...
“Being now, as it were, one family:” Shipmate bonding on the slave vessel Emilia, in Rio de Janeiro and throughout the Atlantic World
Luso-Brazilian Review
Walter Hawthorne
2008 Este artigo analisa a vida dos africanos num navio negreiro, o Emilia. O navio foi capturado pela fragata inglesa Morgiana em 1821 e levado ao Rio de Janeiro. No Rio, a comissão mista anglo-portuguesa condenou o navio pelo crime de comércio ilícito de escravos. Os africanos do Emilia ficaram na condição de “escravos livres” sob a custódia do governo local por um período de quatorze anos. Foram distribuídos entre instituições públicas e concessionários particulares para servir como “trabalhadores livres”. Na prática suas experiências de trabalho foram semelhantes às de escravos. Depois de quatorze anos, um grupo dos escravos livres do Emilia voltou à África juntos. O artigo propõe que a identidade mais importante para reforçar as relações entre os africanos não foi uma identidade étnica, mas sim uma identidade nascida no Emilia, uma identidade de companheiros de viagem (“shipmates”).