Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History

Winner, James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship

A stunning work of popular history--the story of how a crop transformed the history of slavery

Americans consume over 1.5 billion pounds of peanut products every year. But few of us know the peanut's tumultuous history, or its intimate connection to slavery and freedom.

Lyrical and powerful, Slaves for Peanuts deftly weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions. Author Jori Lewis reveals how demand for peanut oil in Europe ensured that slavery in Africa would persist well into the twentieth century, long after the European powers had officially banned it in the territories they controlled.

Delving deep into West African and European archives, Lewis recreates a world on the coast of Africa that is breathtakingly real and unlike anything modern readers have experienced. Slaves for Peanuts is told through the eyes of a set of richly detailed characters--from an African-born French missionary harboring runaway slaves, to the leader of a Wolof state navigating the politics of French imperialism--who challenge our most basic assumptions of the motives and people who supported human bondage.

At a time when Americans are grappling with the enduring consequences of slavery, here is a new and revealing chapter in its global history.

Publisher: New Press
Published: 04/19/2022
Pages: 352
Weight: 1.4lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.00w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9781620971567


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/10/2022

About the Author

Jori Lewis is an award-winning journalist who writes about agriculture and the environment. Her reports have appeared on PRI's The World and in Discover Magazine, Pacific Standard, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She is also a contributing editor of Adi, a literary magazine about global politics. In 2018, she received the prestigious Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction. Lewis splits her time between Illinois and Senegal, and Slaves for Peanuts (The New Press) is her first book.