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.

BIO

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.

REVIEWS

“Within these pages, you’ll encounter plagues and palace intrigues, adventures and misadventures, kingmakers and kingbreakers, fortunes won and lost—all 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 of The River Where Blood Is Born and co-editor of Revise the Psalm

“Slaves for Peanuts is 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 of Breathe

“Slaves for Peanuts is 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 of Fisherman’s Blues

[H]  New Press  /  April 19, 2022

 1.4" H x 9.2" L x 6.0" W (1.4 lbs) 352 pages