Book of the week: The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World by Greg Grandin

(Metropolitan, $30)

From the story of a slave rebellion on a single ship, historian Greg Grandin has crafted a “fascinatingly intimate” tour of the 19th-century world that sired today’s global economy, said Scott Martelle in the Los Angeles Times. If you’ve read Herman Melville, you may recognize the central episode: When New England sea captain Amasa Delano boarded a ramshackle Spanish ship off the coast of Chile in 1805, he little suspected that his counterpart on the Tryal, Benito Cereno, was being held hostage. But the slaves on the distressed vessel had rebelled two months earlier, and Cereno was being forced to pretend that he remained in command. Melville revealed the ruse on his story’s last page; by returning to the tale, Grandin manages to illuminate why an era we think of as the age of liberty was also a moment when the slavery trade boomed.

Grandin captures much of the era’s complexity, said The Economist. In addition to correcting details in Melville’s 1855 novella that misrepresent the true story, the author of 2009’s Fordlandia upends standard perceptions about how the slave trade worked.“It was not just, as is commonly supposed, a matter of white villains and black victims.” Men of color sometimes captained the slave ships, and their human cargo included war prisoners who’d been sold into bondage by African rulers. “Unfortunately, the horrors in Grandin’s history are unrelenting.” He ranges widely to show us the cruelty and venality of the slave business, but doesn’t even pay lip service to those who were fighting to end it. “A better balanced history would have included the good guys, too.”

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Grandin also misreads the novella that frames his book, said H. Bruce Franklin in the Los Angeles Review of Books. He argues that Melville treated slavery as a metaphor for the general human condition, not as a singularly grievous and corrupting institution. In truth, Melville probably would have been “thrilled and amazed” by how closely Grandin’s views about slavery track with his, and how much Grandin has added by tracking down the real-life backstories of every key character in Benito Cereno. Each of those narratives wends through “the explosive contradictions” of the early 19th century, when the industrial revolution unleashed earthshaking political revolutions as well as modern imperialism. This “inventive, audacious, passionate” book will teach readers volumes about the history of slavery, freedom, and deception in the New World.