Mélanie Lamotte

Spanning Louisiana, Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Isle Bourbon and India, “Worlds of the Enslaved” is the most geographically expansive account to date of enslaved people’s lives in the French empire. This book draws on interdisciplinary methods to offer a history from below of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It mobilizes a wide range of sources—enslaved people’s court testimonies, travel narratives, and official records read against the grain, as well as material evidence from notarial archives, maps, archaeological findings, and museum collections—to reconstruct everyday life in captivity. Rather than simply acknowledging that the enslaved had social lives, or reducing all their actions to resistance, the book analyzes the circumstances that enabled the formation of families, communities, and enslaved economies. By shifting the frame beyond the Americas, it asks: how can a broader view change understandings of slavery? The book’s global reach reveals cultures, labor, and natural environments as central forces in shaping enslaved domestic, community, and economic lives, reframing conversations on French slavery and slavery more broadly. Complementing the book is a digital companion project which maps the voyages of hundreds of French slave ships across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and documents life on board.