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The historical roots of multicultural unity along the Upper Guinea Coast and in Guinea-Bissau

“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

Gorge: An African Seaman and his Flights from ‘Freedom’ back to ‘Slavery’ in the Early Nineteenth Century

From “Black Rice” to “Brown”: Rethinking the History of Risiculture in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Atlantic

“Being now, as it were, one family:” Shipmate bonding on the slave vessel Emilia, in Rio de Janeiro and throughout the Atlantic World

From Africa to Brazil traces the flows of enslaved Africans from identifiable points in the broad region of Africa called Upper Guinea to Amazonia, Brazil. These two regions, though separated by an ocean, were made one by a slave route. Walter Hawthorne considers why planters in Amazonia wanted African slaves, why and how those sent to Amazonia were enslaved, and what their Middle Passage experience was like. The book is also concerned with how Africans in diaspora shaped labor regimes, determined the nature of their family lives, and crafted religious beliefs that were similar to those they had known before enslavement. This study makes several broad contributions. It presents the only book-length examination of African slavery in Amazonia and identifies with precision the locations in Africa from where members of a large diaspora in the Americas hailed. From Africa to Brazil also proposes new directions for scholarship focused on how immigrant groups created new or recreated old cultures.

From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830 (African Studies)

 Hawthorne reevaluates long-held notions about the Atlantic slave trade's impact on a number of "stateless" - or decentralized - societies in Africa's Guinea-Bissau region. He shows that decentralized societies were by no means passive victims of the slave trade, as commonly depicted in the literature, but vigorously defended themselves from the incursions of the raiders.

Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast,1400-1900 (Social History of Africa Series)

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.

The Slave Trade

Brazil

Upper Guinea

Atlantic

The History of Slavery

Michigan State University Profile

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Who were America’s enslaved? A new database humanizes the names behind the numbers

MSU uses $1.5m Mellon Foundation grant to build massive slave trade database

Seven MSU graduate programs rank no. 1 nationally

Faculty voice: Walter Hawthorne: African history at MSU

Professor and chairperson of MSU’s Department of History

Dr. Walter Hawthorne talk: New Directions in Digital Public History: Africa and The Atlantic World

New Directions in Digital Public History

Walter Hawthorne

Professor of African History and Chairperson Department of History

Presentation to the MSU Board of Trustees on October 27, 2017

Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network is an open access repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. It includes the names, ethnicities, skills, occupations, and illnesses of individual slaves involved in the Atlantic slave trade. It also connects slaves to family members creating a complex web of social and kinship networks. In this way Slave Biographies reveals much about slave life in the New World and about African slaves’ lives in parts of the Old World.

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