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

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The winner of the James A. Beard Foundation Book Award and Harriet Tubman Prize

A complex story crossing time and oceans (National Public Radio), Jori Lewiss prizewinning Slaves for Peanuts deftly weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions. With elegant prose and engaging details (Pulitzer Prizewinner Imani Perry), 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.

This informative and compassionate account unearths a little-known chapter in the history of slavery and European imperialism (Publishers Weekly), recreating a world on the coast of Africa that is breathtakingly real and unlike anything modern readers have experienced. Slaves for Peanuts is told in rich detail through the eyes of West African men and women (CivilEats)from an African-born French missionary harboring runaway slaves, to the leader of a Wolof state navigating the politics of French imperialismwho 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.

Reviews

Praise forSlaves for Peanuts:
A rich and very readable overview of people and peanuts in nineteenth-century West Africa.
World Literature Today

Slaves for Peanutsis a valuable addition to agricultural and West African history.
Nature

The geopolitical game Lewis describes inSlaves for Peanutsis an old one, and one essential to the formation of the modern world.
Africa Is a Country

"Slaves for Peanutsplumbs a fascinating and disturbing slice of history, shining a light on another glaring example of Western hypocrisy and oppression.
NPR Books

[Slaves for Peanuts] unearths the stories of African kingdoms and colonial settlements, showing how demand for peanut oil in Europe drove the expansion of the peanut trade in Senegal in the 19th century and ensured that slavery and indentured labor in West Africa would continue long after the Europeans had abolished it.
Civil Eats

Astute and distressing. . . . This informative and compassionate account unearths a little-known chapter in the history of slavery and European imperialism.
Publishers Weekly

Within these pages, youll encounter plagues and palace intrigues, adventures and misadventures, kingmakers and kingbreakers, fortunes won and lostall wrapped around the mighty peanut! In well-researched, engaging prose, Jori Lewis unravels the intimate connections between this major export crop, enslavement, and abolition on Senegambian soil. The wars fought over it, and the history that surrounds it. This work is an important contribution to African historiography.
Sandra Jackson-Opoku, author ofThe River Where Blood Is Bornand co-editor ofRevise the Psalm

In this whirlwind tour with the yellow-blossomed peanut across the Atlantic world, journalist Jori Lewis skillfully unveils the intertwined and troubling trajectory of plants, people, slavery, and colonialism.Slaves for Peanutsis a broad, complex, and unexpected environmental history vibrantly told.
Tiya Miles, professor of history, Harvard University, and author ofAll That She Carried

Slaves for Peanutsis a revelation. With elegant prose and engaging details, Lewis uncovers a vital history that promises to transform our understanding of slavery and colonialism. Though focused on a single crop, this terrain is vast and deep. I highly recommend this outstanding work.
Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University, and author ofBreathe

Jori Lewiss superbly readable book does more than bring life to something we all too often ignore: the history of slavery in Africa. She has also found a sort of African version of the Underground Railroad. And all of this is connected to an everyday food whose history we seldom think of.
Adam Hochschild, journalist, historian, lecturer, and bestselling author ofKing Leopolds Ghost

Slaves for Peanutsis an extraordinary and often tender work of meticulous research that spans time and continents, an insightful and captivating narrative of how slavery in Africa supported industrialization in the West, and how enslaved people took back their freedom. I am in awe of the authoritative care with which Jori Lewis lays out the entangled relationships between white supremacy, capitalism, food, and the indefatigable human agency. A must-read that illustrated the long-standing history of the many ways in which the African continent has been for centuries paying the price for the comforts of the Global North.
Anna Badkhen, author ofFishermans Blues

Jori Lewis has achieved the nearly impossible task of educating us about peanuts, a vegetable juggernaut that has changed the world, while recounting stories of slavery and freedom, all presented with extraordinary nuance and humanity.Slaves for Peanutsis a triumph of deep research and engaging writing.
Andrs Resndez, professor, department of history, University of California, Davis, and author ofThe Other Slavery

In this magnificently researched, beautifully told narrative history, Jori Lewis brings the roiling story of slavery and liberation in West Africa to life. By combing through stacks of archived documents on three continents, she masterfully weaves a rich tale of African kingdoms and European civilizers; of unbathed Englishmen and mystical priestesses; of camel caravans and railroad bandits; of imperial decrees, epic poems, and forests in the mist. At the center of it all stands the towering figure of an African protestant pastor and liberator; and, not far away, the fertile soils that would send the humble, mighty peanut to distant shores, and into history.
Sandy Tolan, professor of journalism, USC Annenberg, and bestselling author ofThe Lemon Tree

Author Bio

Jori Lewis is an award-winning journalist who writes about agriculture and the environment. Her reports have appeared on PRIs 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.