Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World

THE EARLY MODERN AMERICAS

Peter C. Mancall, Series Editor

Volumes in the series explore neglected aspects of early modern history in the western hemisphere. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the Atlantic World from 1450 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

A list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

POISONED RELATIONS

Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World

Chelsea Berry

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

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To Mr. Aube, Mr. Willis, and Mr. Divis,

who taught me to look closer

CONTENTS

Introduction. A Weapon of the Weak or an Abuse of Power?

Chapter 1. Pre-Atlantic Poisoning Cultures

Chapter 2. Cross-Cultural Exchanges and Poison

Chapter 3. Contested Idioms

Chapter 4. Poison and the Belly

Chapter 5. Binding Power

Chapter 6. Creating Narratives About Poison

Conclusion. The Taken-for-Granted Must Cease to Be So

Appendix A. An Introduction to Comparative Historical Linguistics

Appendix B. Language Classification Trees

Appendix C. Word Roots

Appendix D. Geographic Overview of Poisoning Cases

Appendix E. Demographic Data

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

A Weapon of the Weak or an Abuse of Power?

Consider the following: a paper packet containing herbs and a root buried under a path; a healing substance given from one enslaved person to another without the knowledge or consent of their enslavers; pouches of unknown drugs distributed from plantation to plantation and suspected of being capable of causing languishing illnesses; and small pieces of a certain stone mixed into a chocolate drink intended to change an enslaver’s behavior.¹ Which of these was poison? The question is a trick. They all were, or at least they all were investigated as such. European enslavers were deeply anxious about healing practices among the enslaved and considered taming efforts—like the stone in the chocolate—as malicious acts of poisoning to be punished. However, the activities of these same healers composing powerful substances, hidden or otherwise, were also viewed ambivalently within communities of African descent as the possession of power always contained the potential abuse of that power. People of both European and African descent conducted investigations to get to the bottom of what they saw as dangerous poisoning events and the poisoners in their midst, but the two groups held different ideas on what these terms meant.

There is a danger in uncritically imposing a singular definition of poison onto the past without thinking through what it meant to whom and when and what they did about it. This book explores this capacious category of poison in the Atlantic world—a space of intense cross-cultural interaction and contestation of ideas—from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. It asks how the different actors involved in poisoning cases—enslavers and the enslaved; practitioners and clients; accused, accusers, witnesses, and judges—perceived and understood these poisoning events. The meanings of poison were not only numerous but contested; people in the Atlantic world struggled with each other over differing interpretations that, especially in the context of trials, could have deadly consequences. There were also places and moments where gaps in ideas between people in enslaved communities and slaveholders operated as dialogues of the deaf and facilitated investigations into alleged poisoning events.² I track the history of the relationships between ideas about poison and the people who held them in the geography of this contested Atlantic world.

From 1680 to 1850, courts in Virginia, Martinique, the Dutch Guianas, and Bahia tried hundreds of free and enslaved people of African descent for poisoning. As events, poison accusations were opportunities for the contestation of ideas about health, healing, and the use of power. Many of these cases centered on the activities of healers of African descent. For example, in 1749, several residents of a neighborhood in Salvador de Bahia complained to the Inquisition about the deaths allegedly caused by Paulo Gomes and Ignacia, both free health practitioners. They were well known to their neighbors, who called them "feiticeiros" (sorcerers) and claimed that they could both inflict and treat illnesses caused by feitiços (charms, sometimes used interchangeably with poison in the eighteenth century). Seven years earlier in Suriname, an enslaved man named Goliath was convicted and executed for making vergift (poison) from the burial grounds, hiding it in his house, and allegedly using it to kill other enslaved people. The trials of the enslaved men Jean François in Martinique (1742) and Tom in Virginia (1744) each revolved around the suspect and possibly poisonous nature of their drugs, powders, and remedies.³ These four cases unfolded in four very different colonies, yet each shared a set of associations: healing practitioners of African descent connected to poison accusations and practices of alleged sorcery. These practitioners are the key to understanding poison accusations; even though they were only involved in about a third of the total cases, their activities (and colonial officials’ concern about their activities) shaped legislation and slaveholders’ ideas on the relationship between poison and healing practices. Legislation and familiarity through public knowledge of investigations and trials helped expand and perpetuate poison accusations, but these laws were reactions to existing practices from plantations to urban streets. Practitioners as potential healers and inflictors of affliction had ambivalent relationships with enslaved communities and enslavers who both valued and feared their services; they were also crucial to the development and justification of narratives about poison.

This book explores changes in ideas about poison through waves of cases over this 170-year period and the many different people who were bound up in them. I have analyzed over five hundred investigations and trials in Virginia, Bahia, Martinique, and the Dutch Guianas (including Suriname and the former Dutch colonies Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo that later became British Guiana)—each a vastly different slave society that varied widely in its conditions of enslaved labor, legal systems, and histories. It is these differences that make the shared patterns I have discovered in key concepts and (mis)understandings of poisoning events so intriguing.

Poison was a cultural construction. Western Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms and understandings of poison, particularly in relation to power. Europeans discussed poison as a gendered weapon of the weak through the lens of demonology, while Africans discussed it as an abuse of power by the powerful through the lens of political morality. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to slave societies, these understandings of poison sometimes clashed and sometimes converged through contemporaneous interpretations of alleged poisoning events. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved: they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities. The forced intimacy of plantations in the Americas created spaces that were not necessarily harmonious but could instead be spaces of uncertain trust filled with fear of attack from within.⁴ Healing included communities of both the living and the dead. Relationships with both were crucial to understanding and curing afflictions as these illnesses were embedded in webs of social context and conflict.⁵ The violence and fraught power relationships of slave societies also influenced the ideas surrounding alleged poisonings. Over time and through the development of self-perpetuating legal regimes for trying poison cases, European enslavers and their descendants developed and solidified key misunderstandings of diasporic African thought.

The gendered discourse of poison as a weapon of the weak that undergirded European interpretations of poisonings had a particular history and was not a universal norm. Uncritically assuming European normativity obscures the ways that people from other regions of the world thought about poison; understanding how people thought is crucial to understanding how and why they acted. The methods of historians of Africa can assist with the challenge of developing a comparable archive on the history of ideas between Europe and Africa, despite significant differences in their source bases. Comparative historical linguistics made it possible for me to build such a history of ideas for West Central Africa, a region of intensive cross-cultural interaction with Europeans after the 1480s that also, and relatedly, became the region of embarkation of nearly half of the African captives who were forced across the Atlantic in the centuries that followed.⁶ Together with ethnographic information from early modern sources on West Africa, this analysis of Atlantic African moral philosophy brings insight to some of the range of ways that Africans and their descendants in the Americas understood and dealt with poisoning as a critique of powerful individuals.

Examining ideas across a wide geographic and temporal scope—with four very different colonies as case studies—clarifies the significance of Atlantic African thought for understanding these waves of poison cases. Existing studies of these cases have predominantly trained their focus on single colonies or empires without expanding their analyses to contemporary cases. Good work has been done, particularly in the French imperial context, examining waves of poison cases and their local contexts.⁷ Understanding both the fine-grained local conditions and the particular laws that shaped poison trials is crucial for grounding any comparative analysis. However, by limiting their studies to specific locales, these works have missed important connections between cases, especially in the expressions of ideas on health, healing, and power within enslaved communities—which conducted poisoning investigations of their own. A geographically discrete approach cannot fully embrace the phenomenon because poison cases and the dynamic ideas that shaped them were not unique to any one location: they spilled beyond imperial and linguistic boundaries. Several collaborative works have brought together cases of spiritual practices and their criminalization in the Caribbean. When there has been comparative work done on poisoning, it has usually centered on famous mid-century poisoning events in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue—the jewels of their respective empires.⁸ Yet the comparison of isolated cases—especially the most famous cases—alone misses their position in a wider context of poisoning trials and African and European discourses about poison.

By focusing on the cultural construction of poison and the transmission and transformation of both European and Atlantic African ideas in the Americas, this book aims to complicate analyses of poison as a weapon of the weak and an assumed tool of resistance against enslavers. Much of the analysis in the literature of alleged poisonings committed by enslaved people has been conducted through the framework of resistance.⁹ These works have made significant contributions to historians’ knowledge on these cases and on the violence deployed by slaveholders—from plantations to courthouses to legislatures—to address them. There is no question that enslaved people resisted their enslavement, and these works have been a valuable corrective to older views on the passivity of enslaved people. However, there is a danger in taking enslavers’ fears and ideas on poison at face value; to do so is to adopt the assumptions and perspectives of these slaveholders—though with a very different interpretation on the morality of these alleged acts. As Marisa Fuentes has noted, a rigid framework of resistance can obscure both the full weight of violence on enslaved people and their messy and contradictory behaviors.¹⁰ This book contributes to an ongoing conversation in the intersecting fields of the history of slavery, criminal justice, and medicine critiquing this resistance-focused approach, a conversation that is finding a way forward through a critical examination of how knowledge and ideas about poison or arson or obeah practices were constructed by multiple groups of actors involved in these cases.¹¹ These works have also highlighted relationships—both predictable antagonisms and unexpected alliances, as historian Randy Browne has put it—and the negotiation of these relationships within infrastructures of colonial power.¹²

Histories of medicine and healing in the context of slavery in the Americas have predominantly analyzed the topic through the lens of power relationships—and rightly so.¹³ Pioneers in the field have largely discussed the efforts of enslaved people to control their own bodies and healing practices as a struggle rooted in the relationship between enslavers and the people they treated as property.¹⁴ In slave societies, enslavers held enormous power over the lives of the enslaved. Violence was a central component of slavery, and slaveholders could and did use force to impose their preferred medical treatment on enslaved people.¹⁵ Studies have examined the negotiation and contestation of medical treatment between enslavers and enslaved people, as well as that in the relationship between healing practitioners of African descent and the enslavers who both relied on and distrusted their services.¹⁶ However, a focus on the struggle between enslaved people or practitioners with slaveholders alone can miss the relationships of power within enslaved communities—along with the accusations of harm caused by abuses of extraordinary powers originating from inside these communities.¹⁷ Untangling the webs of social relationships among the enslaved is necessary to understanding both poison accusations and efforts to diagnose and treat illnesses. The living quarters of the enslaved were potential sources of both solidarity and fear.¹⁸ Fraught relationships—not only between enslaved people and enslavers but also within enslaved communities—were at the heart of both poison accusations and healing.

Poison accusations were community-wide processes that were emotionally fraught and embedded in these webs of social relationships. The vast literature on witchcraft and witch hunting in both Europe and Africa has been useful for understanding these social and emotional dynamics and their relationships to power. This history is necessarily intertwined with the history of healing, as both Europeans and Africans have perceived malevolent practices through damage to personal and communal health—affliction rendering a person powerless. As with accusations of witchcraft in early modern Europe, the personal stakes involved should not lead historians to assume that poison was merely a cover for some other real conflict. A turn in European literature on witchcraft since the 1980s has insisted on taking an emic approach—attempting to understand how early modern Europeans understood witchcraft—rather than thinking about witchcraft belief as an indication of ignorance or superstition.¹⁹ Works on ideas about witchcraft in early America have likewise sought to understand the ideas of Africans, Indigenous Americans, and Europeans on their own terms while exploring how cross-cultural interactions altered and reshaped these ideas.²⁰ In African history, communication with and manipulation of spirits for either communal or selfish ends has not been code for political power; rather, it was central to conceptions of power, and that power was relational. This insight—not so much that spiritual power is political but that politics is a form of spiritual power—has been influential for thinking about relationships of power in Atlantic Africa and the African diaspora in the early modern period.²¹ In terms of poison cases, these durable and widespread ideas about the morality of power centered on intent and use help us understand why enslaved communities sometimes critiqued and accused healers of African descent for allegedly abusing their powers.

Alongside exciting new works on the intellectual history of the Black Atlantic—whether focused on rituals of diplomacy or attitudes toward water culture or practices of bloodletting—this book explores diasporic African thought and practices on their own terms in addition to tracking their complex interactions with European ideas.²² I build on scholarship from the past decade that seeks to move past old creolization debates on change versus continuity from the African past to examine what practices and rituals of diverse peoples did and how they interacted in contexts of power.²³ An analysis of the cultural construction of poison is also at its heart an analysis of the relationships between health, healing, and power in the African diaspora, as many of those accused were healers. Healing interactions between Africans and Europeans and regionally between Atlantic African societies form an essential context for understanding ideas and practices in the Americas.²⁴ A deeper understanding of durable concepts surrounding poison enriches our conversations on the intellectual Black Atlantic, not because of any assumed static continuity but rather for insight on the ideas that healers in the Americas drew on and how they resonated with their diverse clientele.²⁵

Communities—of free and enslaved people of African descent, of enslavers, of colonial officials and natural philosophers—were also essential for constructing narratives about alleged poisoning events through ritual ordeals, trials, letters, and books about poison. These narratives reveal assumptions about what different observers expected to see, as well as the circulation and amplification of common knowledge and key (mis)understandings about poison. The concept of dialogues of the deaf from anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey is useful for understanding the ways that these constructed narratives from multiple communities converged and slipped past each other.²⁶ My work also draws on therapy management and public healing from scholarship on health and affliction in African history to better understand the actions of communities of African descent involved in poisoning events. At its core, therapy management focuses on the social relationships that have shaped medical knowledge and action.²⁷ Parallel to the turn in European medical historiography, the emergence of the framework of therapy management has expanded the negotiation and interpretation of affliction to a wide group of actors, each with their own perspectives, and focuses on the therapeutic process rather than on single events. Public healing is a framework developed by Africanists for understanding the relationship between politics and broadly defined social illness and cures.²⁸ In the conception laid out by historian Steven Feierman and anthropologist John Janzen, healing and health need to be understood as relational and fundamentally rooted in historically changing social orders. Succinctly, whoever has had the power to diagnose illness has had the power to define cultural conceptions of evil and harm in the wider public.²⁹ In its relationship to conceptions of afflictions as public threats, public healing has been intertwined with the responsibilities of powerful people to cure. Public healing is useful for thinking about poison cases both for the way it connects healing to political power and for the emphasis it places on the need to first understand social relationships in order to understand the diagnosis and curing of affliction.

Terms, Locations, and Sources

This book brings together sources from multiple languages and archives. While its expansiveness of scope is what allows for the book’s core arguments on African and European ideas, it also poses a problem for terminology. In short, this book is written in English when a central argument is that the idioms and durable themes regarding poison are culturally constructed in ways revealed by language. The logic of English words—and of ideas expressed in a range of European languages generally—does not quite fit a range of African concepts relating to health and empowerment. Poison as both a verb and a noun is a key example. It is the primary term used across my sources whose forms—poison, empoisonner, vergift, feitiçaria (which eighteenth-century Portuguese speakers could use to describe both sorcery and poison)—appeared in colonial trials where narratives about affliction and power were contested. When a twenty-first-century English speaker says poison, they usually mean a substance capable of causing illness or death; the first image that may come to mind is perhaps a little bottle of liquid, maybe even with a skull and crossbones on the label. This image is not necessarily wrong, but incomplete; it is only one of a kaleidoscope of possible meanings that have each been constructed in historical context. I do not offer a precise definition for poison in this book because my point is that it was culturally contingent and did not have a universal or permanent transhistorical meaning. Fully aware of the faults of the term, I have chosen to use poison throughout the book precisely to highlight its constructed and malleable nature.

The English language also poses problems for discussing accusations against the alleged activities of so-called poisoners, witches, or sorcerers. There are problems inherent with using the terms of the accusers, as doing so can lead to an uncritical assumption of their perspective on whom the accused were and what they allegedly did or did not do.³⁰ However, these terms of accusation are still important for what they can tell us about the ideas and perspectives of the accusers. I strive throughout the book to be clear on who accused whom of being or doing what. At the same time, whenever possible, I refer to the accused by the terms they used to describe themselves, often a vernacular variation on doctor. Historians of medicine have critiqued and analyzed the ways that terms rooted in western biomedicine—like medicine and doctor—shape discussions on legitimacy in the West due to the history of modern medical professionalization; for this reason, they generally prefer terms such as healing and health practitioners to get past that discourse. While I note whenever I found usage of African terms such as nganga (expert, healer-diviner), most of the surviving information we have about these cases—including testimony by people of African descent—was spoken and recorded in European languages. Most often, I use the term practitioner to keep the focus on practices that could include actions perceived as healing or harmful by different historical audiences depending on their perspective.

Figure 1. Map of the Atlantic world, c. 1760. Erin Greb Cartography.

The four political jurisdictions I chose for this study—Bahia, Martinique, Virginia, and the Dutch Guianas—are not necessarily an intuitive grouping and require explanation. All four locales were slave societies; by the late seventeenth century in Virginia, Martinique, and the Dutch Guianas—and significantly earlier in Bahia—their respective economies, social relations, and legal structures revolved around slavery. However, they were not all the same. They each were a part of different empires: Bahia in the Portuguese and later Brazilian empire, Martinique in the French, Virginia in the British and later the United States, and the Dutch Guianas split and changing hands between the Dutch and the British. Bahia as a slave society was significantly older than the other locations, and Virginia had several dramatic differences in the lower proportion of enslaved people in the general population, the higher proportion of creoles (American born) in the enslaved population, and the main system of enslaved labor revolving around tobacco rather than sugar production.³¹ There were also significant cultural and religious differences between the Catholic Portuguese and French and the Protestant Dutch and English in power in these respective locations. I chose these four very different locations for my study precisely because of their legal, demographic, cultural, and economic divergences; these differences highlight the striking patterns I found in poisoning cases. Ideas about poison were transimperial and inextricably bound with the power relationships of slave societies and the ideas of the Africans forced into them. These discourses on the morality and use of power had an impact on poison cases in each colony, even though the internal context of each slave society was different.

I do not wish to imply that these were the only four slave societies in the Americas with the kinds of cases connected to healing practitioners of African descent highlighted in this study; historians working on these locales and others—such as Saint-Domingue, South Carolina, the British West Indies, and the Spanish Caribbean—have also discussed similar cases and tropes about poison.³² Nor were these the first major poisoning trials in the Americas. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several recurring tropes and themes of the later waves of poison cases—for example, concerns about poison as the weapon of the weak, the activities of healing practitioners in a diverse marketplace, and the creation of narratives about causes of and solutions to affliction through rituals and trials—appeared in Spanish colonies in the Americas.³³ Spanish institutions mapped their idea of weakness and susceptibility to manipulation from the devil—so prevalent in European gendered discourse about women, witchcraft, and poison—onto their ideas about Indigenous peoples and religions in the Americas.³⁴ While Indigenous practitioners came up frequently in testimony given to the seventeenth-century Mexico City Inquisition—for complex reasons that included the Inquisition’s lack of jurisdiction over índios—they appeared but rarely on the edges of the poison cases I examined from Bahia, Martinique, the Dutch Guianas, and Virginia, which were each demographically different from New Spain.³⁵ Still, the core European idea of the weapon of the weak resonated even when applied to different alleged practitioners. Seventeenth-century Cartagena offers particularly salient precedent for later eighteenth-century cases, as the practitioners of African descent who numerically dominated the city’s competitive marketplace of health practitioners were also susceptible to accusations of poison, especially during a wave of witch-conspiracies in the 1620s and 1630s.³⁶ Although the eighteenth-century records I examined did not explicitly reference these Spanish precedents, the Atlantic world was an entangled space where knowledge—including assumptions, (mis)understandings, and tropes—could and did flow between imperial borders.³⁷ Many of the ideas that surfaced in these earlier cases continued to do so in later centuries because the problem of how to survive and concerns about the morality and use of power only intensified with the expansion of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.

However, the four locations I chose each had comparable runs of surviving trial records with chronological overlap that allowed for large-scale comparative quantitative and qualitative analyses that were not always available for other locations. For example, while evidence from other sources points to cases of alleged poisoning in eighteenth-century Jamaica, the only surviving pre-1770 regular slave court records for the British Caribbean is a spreadsheet-style summary from 1834 of cases tried before the St. Andrews parish slave court from 1746 to 1782.³⁸ Even this summary contains more information than the surviving fragments of Barbados cases in eighteenth-century council meeting minutes.³⁹ Due to their differences, the four locations from four empires offer a broad sampling of the wider phenomenon of poison trials and highlight the significance of shared Atlantic African ideas about poison. While the focus of this book is on ideas, I have included a quantitative examination of my dataset along with a geographic and chronological overview of poisoning trials as Appendix D.

Trials form the backbone of this project; it is necessary to critically examine the context of their production. Michel-Rolph Trouillot has influentially highlighted the many moments of silencing in historical production, from the creation of the sources that form the basis of archives to their interpretation and use by historians.⁴⁰ Historians must critically contend with the epistemic violence of the archive, considering who appeared in documentary records—and who did not—and in what particular contexts. The traces of the past that make up colonial archives were produced in specific contexts of violence and power in slave societies, and the purpose of these trials was to police and control people of African descent; they are by their nature fragmentary, distorted, and limited.⁴¹ Historians seeking to write histories of marginalized people in the Atlantic world have demonstrated both the violence embedded in the creation and preservation of these sources and ways forward for critical analysis.⁴² For example, Sophie White’s recent social historical work using trial records from French Louisiana productively and critically mines courtroom testimony by enslaved people and the parallel narratives they created in a range of cases.⁴³

With the limitations of trial records in mind, comparative analysis of trials can yield important insights on the demographics of the accused and the relationship between cases and legislation. For most of the court systems, I was able to collect information on individuals from all social groups tried for all alleged crimes, allowing me to place poison accusations in a wider criminal context and track changes in this context over time.⁴⁴ My analysis of this data is also informed by close readings of various laws and local ordinances on poison; trials only made sense in the context of the laws under which courts tried them. Changes in laws yield insight into shifting relationships of power through the ability to define crime. Poison legislation marked these relationships through attempted boundary drawing for what constituted the legitimized practice of healing and the limits of an enslaver’s power—at least in theory—to judge and wield violence toward enslaved people.⁴⁵ In addition to discussions where relevant in each chapter, I have included an overview of legal changes over time in Appendix D. Correspondence between colonial officials and various metropoles both enriches the context for poison trials and laws and, in some cases, helps bridge gaps in trial data. Personal correspondence written by slaveholders involved in poison cases also offers an expanded view of their interpretation of poisoning events. Together, the trials, laws, and correspondence weave a large tapestry through which we can see the expression of ideas on poison, healing, and power.

The trials are valuable sources not only as data but as scenes of action where people articulated multiple perspectives on poisoning. Courtrooms were not only sites of slaveholding power and violence but also potential sites of contestation over the meaning of alleged poisoning events.⁴⁶ Our ability to observe these contested ideas is mediated through these problematic surviving sources.⁴⁷ All trial records must be handled with caution, as individuals were highly unlikely to be speaking freely—especially when forced to defend themselves. This caution is particularly necessary for working with cases from legal contexts that allowed for torture to extract confession, including the Lisbon Inquisition, the Suriname Court of Policy and Criminal Justice, and the French Ancien Régime tribunal and appeals courts.⁴⁸ However, records with testimony are still valuable as rare contemporary recordings of Africans and people of African descent in their own words—at least as recorded by clerks—and the stories that defendants chose to present to try to survive their cases.⁴⁹ Historians can use their words, and the questions asked by the courts, to identify different assumptions and perspectives undergirding ideas about poison in particular cases, as well as the manipulation of these ideas.

An additional word of caution is necessary on discrepancies in the level of detail provided by documents originating from different court systems—especially in relation to testimony from enslaved people. Both the surviving Virginia county court records and the eighteenth-century Martinique Conseil Supérieur records are case summaries: very useful for collecting demographic information on the accused but often lacking in extensive detail about the affliction an alleged target suffered; how the case first came (or was brought) to the attention of enslavers; or how suspicion landed on the individual being tried. The summaries from Martinique sometimes identified enslaved witnesses testifying in cases against other enslaved people; in Virginia, while enslaved people were legally allowed to testify in such cases, they were rarely identified beyond a maddeningly terse note of divers witnesses. For Virginia, many of the records from burned counties did not survive the Civil War, rendering any quantitative efforts to tally poison trials suggestive rather than definitive. The functioning of the Lisbon Inquisition is also important for understanding the context of the production of information on alleged poisoning practices. As part of their discreet initial investigations following private denunciations—which were sometimes launched by free and enslaved people of African descent—Inquisitorial commissioners in Bahia often cast a wide net in interviewing community members, including enslaved people, who might be able to shed light on the accusations. These records were detailed but were also shaped by the questions commissioners asked. The trial records from Suriname have by far the most detail about enslaved people in the orbit of poisoning events as they contain transcripts of questions and answers of both defendants and witnesses. However, even in the Suriname cases, there was significant variety in the manner enslaved voices appeared in each case. Sometimes courts recorded enslaved witnesses delivering testimony in the courtroom; in other cases, their statements were collected as depositions to be read, or summarized and likely filtered by an enslaver or an overseer when making their own deposition or testimony to the court. The distinct and distinctly fraught contexts of each form of testimony need to be considered when handling these cases. Trial records from these four locations, with their many limitations, nevertheless do contain significant information. Wherever possible, I have corroborated evidence from trials with information from plantation papers and personal and official correspondence.

Understanding the multifaceted phenomenon of poison cases in the Americas requires a multifaceted approach. This book is a social history of ideas: tracking the transmission, transformation, and interaction of ideas about poison while never losing sight of the people who created, shaped, and lived them. It is also an intellectual history that looks beyond elites to see what Rhiannon Stephens and Axel Fleisch describe as the intellectual work of ordinary people.⁵⁰ Multiple languages and methods have made it possible for me to approach my sources from multiple angles. Social historical analysis of the demographics and content of poison trials has yielded insights on large social patterns over time and connections between my research locations. Thick descriptions of individual poison cases and close attention to the perspectives of the various actors within them, borrowed from anthropology, have assisted my efforts to understand how people involved in these cases saw and comprehended these events themselves. Finally, my training in the use of comparative historical linguistics grounds ideas expressed in poison cases in deeper changes over time and has allowed me to expand my field of inquiry to oral societies beyond (predominantly European-created) written records.

One of the major challenges of doing African history, and especially of doing comparative work between African and European history, is the difference in source bases. Most societies in early Africa—indeed, most societies in the pre-modern world—were orally based, and, with some important exceptions, there are relatively few surviving documents created by Atlantic Africans before circa 1450.⁵¹ I am indebted to several important works in history and anthropology in the past decade that have brought together ideas on extraordinary powers to heal and harm from Europe and Africa to trace their influence in the Americas.⁵² However, by being forced for their sections on Africa to rely on predominantly European-created observations from the early modern period—or, in the case of anthropologists, ethnographic work from the more recent past—these scholars have not been able to give a deeper history of how Africans discussed and changed their ideas