transcript

KIMBERLY JONES  

I want to start first with talking about the process in which you created the text and know that it began from a conference. Can you talk about some of the challenges of turning a conference into a book? 

SEAN M. SMITH

Well, it takes more time than you think. First of all, the conference that this book came out of, the conference had the same name as the book; was all the way back in February of 2018. And the book came out in November of 2021. So almost four years, between the conference and the book, most presses are up against a lot of economic realities. And the way they deal with that is they want to keep the book relatively short. So they're not spending a bunch of money on editing, paper and everything else. And, and they want to make sure that it's something that they think will sell, at least, you know, relative to the academic market.

And so for myself, and my co editor, Chris Willoughby, the first step was to figure out what to include in the book, right, and we ended up deciding what we were going to do if we're going to do nine sort of body chapters. And then Chris and I, as the editors, wrote an introduction that was about the same length as that of this chapter. And then we also wanted to do a brief epilogue to connect it with, I guess you'd say modern issues of race medicine. And so once we sort of knew about how many spots we had, we started really looking at the presentations of what was presented at the conference and thinking both about what we were really excited about, but also, what are all the medicine topics or the healing topics, you know, what, what do we have to cover, and then we, you know, we talked to the individual authors got them on board. Unfortunately, for different reasons, some of the people we initially talked to, you know, had conflicts so that already, we're under contract with that work, they couldn't, couldn't put it in our edited volume. And so then, sometimes we had to go back and find some other people. And we ended up with a few people contributing to the book that were not originally at the conference, partially just because we needed to sort of get the breadth that we were looking for. And then the editing process, it just takes a while. We asked people for full drafts, we then circulated those full drafts amongst everyone who participated, to hopefully make some connections within the books. And there's another round of editing with the press and peer reviewers, actually, so we had it peer reviewed once they asked us to make some final revisions, then COVID hit and good luck finding a peer reviewer. So they had to find somebody different and a little bit more time. And they also had a few comments. So there were a few rounds of that with the pressing peer reviewers. And then we're on to sort of the production level of editing, which is, you know, making sure everything is spelled right and footnoted correctly.

KIMBERLY JONES  

I think for the past several years, we've all found COVID pretty disruptive. I would think besides the issues with finding reviewers, there will be other setbacks. 

SEAN M. SMITH

Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say, it wasn't a huge impact, but it definitely delayed us. not so much from our side as the editors and contributors. But the initial peer reviewer had, we heard this was probably

October of 2020. So you know, six months into the COVID. A peer reviewer was like, I just got too much on my plate. I don't know exactly what their situation was. But I can imagine the pressures of all the stuff we were going through learning to teach online, more family at home. And so then the press basically decided to go find another peer reviewer because of the time constraints and to get it to press more quickly. So I wouldn't say there's a huge impact during COVID. I mean, most of our work, you know, is email and virtual anyway, but the big impact was that it delayed the peer review process. 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Yeah, that makes sense. So I wonder then how related is the text medicine, race and healing to what you're working on right now.

SEAN M. SMITH

 My current project really comes out of my dissertation. I'm taking the dissertation and expanding it a bit. And it's really about the way that abolitionists and pro slavery writers both use common ideas about race to argue over slavery. And in particular, I look at an idea that I call climatic racialism, which is basically the idea that differently racialized people belong in different climates. And in terms of slavery. That means that it's the idea basically, that people from Africa as a hot place should be working in a hot place like the Caribbean US South, whereas, people from Europe are more naturally acclimated to cooler places, say, like, to England, right like, and this this way of thinking about race, or at least the set of ideas that influenced that are very old, they go back to basically the beginning of the Western medical tradition back to Hippocrates and Galen. But these ideas were changed and messed around and used in different ways, you know, over the centuries, but they were still pretty formative in the way that in the 18th century, when my work picked up the way people were thinking about bodies and health and the relationship to climate in the world. And so my research looks at the way that that idea that climatic racialism was used by a whole range of pro slavery people. And what I ended up finding that I did not expect was that most anti slavery writers also bought into this idea, right? So it's not just the pro slavery, people making racial assumptions, it's the anti slavery, people also making basically the same racial assumptions. Now, they use that, obviously, to make a very different argument. But they still share this common racial idea, a common idea, a common argument was that people in Africa should be healthy in hot places. When we look at the Caribbean, enslaved African people are dying at really high rates. Right, they're not a self sustaining population. 

Therefore, their death, their illness, can be blamed upon the slave masters as treating them poorly. And so it's a way of arguing against slavery. But it also took for granted that assumption that people of color were going to be healthier in these hot climates. So today, we would understand more in terms of germs. Yellow Fever is a disease that if you encounter early in your life, you get a relatively mild case, and you don't catch it again. So if you're from a place where you're likely to catch yellow fever as a child, you're not probably going to catch it again. So you will appear healthier in a climate with yellow fever. And that may be something that Europeans who were using these ideas observed, though there's a debate, it may have been more convenient than actual observation. And malaria is sort of the same way you don't get complete immunity to it, but the cases get less bad. And it while there are genetic protections, like the sickle cell trait, which can, which can reduce the impact of malaria on your body. We often associate traits like that racially, but they don't map actually particularly well into racial groups. For instance, people we normally think of as White from places like Sicily or Greece also have genetic predispositions. And not everybody from Sub Saharan Africa has those traits, either. Africa is a huge place. And the concept of race and health mapping race on ideas like immunity to malaria or something like that doesn't match particularly well. My work is very much about the way these medical ideas could be used to argue about slavery, and the way that that reinforces ideas of race. And that's not something that's presented directly in the book,

KIMBERLY JONES  

speaking about your title, I do have a question about medicine and healing and how they develop and manifest in the age of slavery, I think you got toward answering the last bit.

SEAN M. SMITH

First of all, we can talk about why the title is medicine and healing. Medicine tends to mean something more strict than I think the concept of healing does. We're talking about sort of a formal tradition of ancient Greece. It spread through the Arabic world because the Arabic world kept those sources and medical texts alive through the so-called Dark Ages, in Europe, where a lot of those kinds of texts were lost in Europe. Today, you go to medical school or become a doctor, a physician, but healing is the way we treat it, thinking about it in this book is a much more inclusive way of thinking. Every society recognizes that some people that sometimes aren't, well, they're not in a healthy condition. And historically, societies have thought about that in different ways. And so we tried to use healing as a very inclusive way of thinking about that. Lots of different practices fit into healing. Western medicine does, but also forms of spiritual healing that you can find all over the world, forms of herbal medicine, or herbal traditions that you can find in different places all over the world in different ways. 

The first chapter, for instance, is about how to call it sort of healing sorcery on the island of Santo Domingue modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where Lauren Derby argues that she sees a fusion of African indigenous healing ideas manifested in ritual stones that sort of draw on both indigenous American and African traditions as a form of healing. And she finds that those practices, though altered, persist today in different kinds of healing rituals on the island. But their are other chapters of the book talk about the duality of the healing and poisoning relationship, which is, again tends to be a common way of thinking about wellness in a lot of places in the world, the lesson from Western medicine, we also think about the way that traditional healing practices from Africa and Europe blended and or interacted in terms of bloodletting rituals, we also think about it in terms of forms of disability. Brandy waters chapter talks about the way that disabled enslaved people tried to make a case for the disability in court in order to be able to manumit themselves for a lower price. And this is in colonial Colombia, where this was a bit more of a common practice in the United States. So right, there's lots of ways of thinking about health. And hopefully that medicine and healing category throws a wide net,

KIMBERLY JONES  

how did the abolitionist that you study incorporate these practices of African peoples and their healing strategies, techniques and cosmologies into the narrative about what slavery was?

SEAN M. SMITH

I would say they did it to disappointingly little, to be honest with you, when abolitionists talk about slave culture, and as well as culture in Africa, they they take a very western centric view about what's culture and not where it does come up. There's a relatively early phase in the popularity of abolition emancipation efforts around the turn of the 19th century, where anti slavery people describe a lot the conditions of people in Africa, and there, what they're trying to do is make a case that Africans aren't as uncivilized, right, quote, unquote, uncivilized as enslavers are trying to make them sound. And they show examples of religion, government and medicine. In an effort to show that these people are like us, they may be wrong about how they do all these things, but at least they have these institutions and sort of the concepts going with. And so that's sort of where you see these ideas of medicine pop up in abolitionist literature. 

KIMBERLY JONES  

For me,your text is representative of our series, title, medicine, race, and democracy as well. They are all prevalent and present in the history of slavery. Can you talk more about how and where you see the themes connecting in the book overall?

SEAN M. SMITH

Sure. I think the first two are the easiest to connect. For me, the medicine and race mark, as this volume shows, as a lot of literature showed right ideas about medicine, have influenced ideas about race and the other way around for a very long period of time. But there's also an ironic tension there, on the one hand, medicines getting used to categorize people of different races, and make a case for them being different. On the other hand, medical research carried out on vulnerable people, say enslaved women, is being used universally, when a doctor does medical research on a person from Africa, they then assume it applies to a person from Europe. But there's this tension in that connection between grace and medicine, that's, that's interesting to explore. And it really, I think, reveals the degree to which race is a category that is used because it is useful to accomplish different things. 

You pick it up when you want to make a case for difference. And then you forget about it when you want to make a case for similarity. For me, the democracy aspect, a number of the essays in medicine and healing in the age of slavery, talk about the relationship between slavery and the state. But as we're also careful to make clear in the introduction, when we're talking about the Atlantic, there are lots of different kinds of states. Before the so-called age of revolutions, these were all Imperial states or colonies of Europe, European empires are largely what we're talking about. Then, with the American Revolution, as well as many of the Latin American independence movements and revolutions. We see independent states being created in the Americas broadly, in the United States that led to a reinforcement of slavery and the existing racial order. In Spanish American states, many of them upon independence, get rid of the institution of slavery and are at least theoretically more racially equal and integrated. And in that case, you have the holdouts in the Spanish America places like Cuba that actually remain as colonies of of Spain to late in the 19th century, like I was describing the tension between race and medicine, there's also this, this tension between race and democracy, that depending on who has the power and how that power is expressed, you can have situations in which democracies are race neutral, would be too strong way to say, but more neutral, and other places where it's not neutral at all right. And in the United States, you really see that second case where after the revolution, you see a lot of gradual abolition laws. And that because before the revolution, slavery was legalized, was legal and all of the 13 colonies. And it's really in that revolutionary moment that states start to outlaw slavery. And at first, most of those states give free people of color, close to full rights, but then almost immediately from the 1790s, through the 1830s, you see those rights get walked back in different ways, restrictions on voting rights, restrictions on, you know, free movement, you know, all kinds of restrictions on people of color. 

And so, even though that's, you know, a democratic society, you see race being used as a way to categorize people and make people less than full citizens, or, you know, even non citizens eventually, you know, and one of the things I show in my work that I find really interesting is that, because because my work spans both the British Empire, the United States, and when you look at the colonization movements, in the early 19th century, which were efforts to sort of return, quote, unquote, return, if you will, people of African descent to Africa, it's a way of, well, depending on the context, what that means is different right in the United States that's largely connected to some of these episodes like maybe about removing black people's political rights in the United States, or trying to make a more White nation by removing free people from the United States, right in the United States that that, basically, the idea was to send them into Liberia. The British Empire did something similar and actually their efforts predated the American efforts in Liberia, the British Empire created a colony called Sierra Leone, which was also sort of a place to send free people of color. However, the British Empire was more than willing to use free people of color. In Africa as a way of building a colony, as a way of extending the Empire, where they thought White people wouldn't be very healthy, right? Because, again, because it's climatic racial ideas.

And so Britons were willing to extend the empire with free people of color. While Americans used basically the same idea to exclude people of color. And this has a bit to do with the way the United States sort of has a quasi imperialism, right? The United States doesn't want to expand exactly into an imperial world, but they sort of want the benefits of empire I sort of want little satellites like Liberia that don't include people of color in the American nation, but still have a loose affiliation with the American nation where there's, there's more of an exclusionary impulse, I would say in the United States racially than there was in Britain.

KIMBERLY JONES  

It just makes me think of the ways that race is this political category as well. Right. And part of the work that it does, please use as you said that it's doing a lot, right, it's doing alot. 

SEAN M. SMITH

But I think you're right about race as a tool that does work, right, you said it does a lot of work and that's the way I think about it, right? It's something you can pick up and use in a lot of different ways. But then people also conveniently forget about it when it doesn't, doesn't make the point they wanted to make.

KIMBERLY JONES  

That's a shame, though. I don't know if I should say shame, but the way that it works is to create a type of democracy that is exclusive to whiteness.

SEAN M. SMITH

Yeah, no, I mean, it is. It is really sort of a tragic story. When you think about it that way.

KIMBERLY JONES  

Well, one of the aims of your work as a historian, I think you said throughout our conversation, is to de-center these Eurocentric narratives and Eurocentric voices. Can you talk about why that is important? And what does the process of de-centering look like?

SEAN M. SMITH

Sure. That's a hard question, because it's sort of a huge question. But I think it's important maybe for people who aren't trained as historians to recognize that the process of doing history and the way we think about what history is, comes from a European way of thinking and a lot of Modern History and really, most academic disciplines come out of sort of the Enlightenment period of period, which was culturally significant, but also institutionally significant. And, you know, we're sort of the modern university and modern disciplines grew out of this period of the Enlightenment, you know, basically the 18th century if we want to date the enlightenment, and so the tendency has been sort of, because of that origin to sort of take Europe and European people as the model of the way human life should be. Right. And, and accordingly, in history, that means that the way Europe developed into what it is now, and when I say Europe, I really mean sort of the West, I think, very much includes US culture, but the way that sort of Western or European civilization developed is taken as normal in history, right? It sort of assumes if we want to talk about medicine, that European modes of medicine and the way they developed are the proper way to make knowledge about people's bodies and their illnesses. 

So as a historian, I think it's important to recognize that that's just basically one culture and a very diverse planet with tons and tons of cultures on different scales. And so when we want to talk about healing and medicine and think about what it means to different people, we have to try to put ourselves in the mindset of those people who come from different cultures. what somebody who was captured and enslaved and sold in the castle on on the coast of Africa thinks about their health is not what the guy sailing, the slave ship is going to think about their health, right. And so to try to cover what that enslaved person thought is both significant because it tells us something about that historical figure. But also, we can think about the conflicts, the points of connection between these different healing systems as a way of explaining a lot of it has happened in western medicine, right, so many cures for diseases historically have come from non western people, and have been incorporated into western medicine over time. But we often forget that the part of what medicine did was learn from other cultures and make it and reinterpret, that would fit within its own explanatory framework. There's lots of reasons to think about these non western healing traditions. One of them is simply to understand the people who lived that experience. And others understand that, that these different systems and their connections, make a certain kind of history in their interaction. And then finally, even if you're really interested in the history of western medicine, you can't understand it without its connections to the wider world. Jonah bark is sort of the classic example which is basically, that it gets turned to quinine. It's been an anti-malarial drug for hundreds of years. It comes from a tree in South America, and Europeans learned about it from local people, but then turned it into an international worldwide commodity where they shipped all over the world in order to protect people from malaria. So Western medicine was learning from different ways of thinking,

KIMBERLY JONES  

What do we assume about enslaved people? They make telling the history of medicine and healing a challenge?

SEAN M. SMITH

I think we assume, fundamentally, that we don't know a lot about them right or that what they think can't be recovered. And there's been a lot of great research, especially in the last 20 years or so that is able to do exactly that. But the difficulty is that most of the sources we have are from enslavers or people, not the not the slaves themselves speaking for themselves, or writing something themselves. But instead, it's what the slave owners, the slave masters, wrote about enslaved people. One of the chapters I really love in our edited collection is the chapter by Elise Mitchell. And she talks about the way that slave the feigning illness has perhaps been misunderstood because of assumptions about enslaved people and their lives and the way they live them. A couple of generations of historians ago became really linked to the idea of slave resistance. The enslaved people don't want to be enslaved, therefore, they're going to push back against it in every possible way. And this can include doing things like pretending to be sick, right feigning, feigning illness in order to get out of work. And historians have, once that concept came along, have generally embraced it. It's a way of showing these points like people really sticking up to the man by like, not working right not doing what they're supposed to be doing. 

One of the things, at least this chapter does is really suggest that how seriously we've taken that concept is really based in slavers beliefs about what enslaved people are doing. She sees that enslavers are writing that they think slaves are feigning illness, because that's what they're afraid they're going to do, right? They want them to work. So they're very suspicious anytime an enslaved person says they're ill. And think, Elise, makes a great argument based on the concept of looking at what treatment is like, for people who say they're ill, right 18th The 19th medicine is pretty gruesome, you're gonna, they're gonna cut you to make you bleed, right? Because bleeding, a traditional therapy, they're gonna give you purgatives, right to make you vomit or to have diarrhea, or you get out the bad humors effectively. And so the treatments were terrible. There's even records of masters beating slaves to try to make them reveal that they're feigned, right, so what at least, what Elises's a chapter really points out is how feigning would have actually put enslaved people in danger? At risk in a way that probably undermines the idea that they're, they're failing much at all, because why would they want to, if anything, would probably lead to worse treatment, but also that because of our records are from enslavers who are afraid of enslaved people not doing the work they want them to, they're going to express that worry more in their writing than probably an enslaved person would.

KIMBERLY JONES  

I have a question about enslaved people with patients. You have several chapters that discuss enslaved people as patients. But then we also know that enslaved people didn't have a right to refuse care. How do we distinguish between enslaved people as patients, and enslaved people, as experimental subjects, our experimental objects are, can we make that distinction?

SEAN M. SMITH

When we talk about enslaved patients, in our book, we're trying to use that category to talk about the desire of enslaved people who are ill and seeking treatment. And you're absolutely right, that enslaved people do not have a lot of freedom to seek out their care, which is part of why it's really interesting to see when they do seek out care. We know from Sharla Fett's great work working cures, that there were essentially hold networks of enslaved people finding ways to treat themselves with the kind of medicine they wanted to with their own healing mechanisms. Though, because they were not free to do that, that carried its own threat, or sometimes masters were okay with that. 

Sometimes they would punish it, if they thought that they were getting the wrong treatment, or they were, you know, they were using those kinds of treatments to fight back against the power of masters. So when we talk about enslaved patients, we're really trying to talk about enslaved people making these choices about their, about their care, as much as they could certainly not unlimited. And that's one of the things I think is really great about the brandy waters chapter I mentioned earlier about disability because she's really showing how enslaved people are trying to use the court system, and medical experts to make a case about their own body. And in fact, a lot of a lot of these people who are using the courts to try to gain their freedom through this idea of disability or you even tell the courts that one of their main goals is getting their freedom is to be able to go get the treatment that they think is appropriate, their masters, not letting them you know, go to some healer somewhere. And so that part of what they're doing is saying I'm trying to get this freedom so I can go to that healer and and part of the reason I think that's significant is that, in the past, what we've generally focused on is the person doing the healing, giving the treatment. 

And instead, it's really amazing when we can uncover not just the people giving the treatment, but also the people seeking the treatment and get a sense of what that might be like and to some degree Dierdre Cooper Owens chapter in the book does that a bit too. She's really interested in what she calls the haptic experiences of enslaved people and the relationship to health and in for her haptic haptic sort of literally means touch, but it's also sort of the larger sort of sensory world that the person is embedded in and, and that it can include things like mental mental illness and the way they're for Dr. Cooper Owens, the way that the the experiences of slavery can cause mental illness but can also sort of alter people's perceptions of their environment, their sensory environment, is really significant. And, and again, that's sort of an example of what we mean when we're talking about recovering enslaved patients' experiences. It's about trying to understand how people who are sick, right, really, really felt and how they dealt with their situation.

KIMBERLY JONES  

Recently, I was in a presentation with one of the contributors, Deidre Cooper Owens. She mentioned quite effectively, the use of medicalized, terms for disability and healing that are available to us in our present moment can be expressed into the past to deepen our understanding of the narratives of the past. What do you think, I think is a bit of a debate in the histories of disability?

SEAN M. SMITH

I think that's an interesting point. I mean, I'll just say broadly that this is something that's often contested in the history of medicine. Is it useful to talk about somebody's historic condition in modern terms? Or is it better to use the historic terms? I am sort of somebody who sits on the fence on that one, not so much that I haven't made up my mind, but rather that I think both are important, and that we can learn more from trying to do both. And that doing one doesn't necessarily mean the others are not useful. I think Dr. Cooper Owens is right that we can gain a new understanding of people's conditions by trying to understand what that means today. If it's something like, you know, a post traumatic stress syndrome, which is a very new definition, but people clearly had their own responses to severe stresses in the past, they may not have been called the same thing. But people still have those experiences and to use our modern understanding of what that meant, or what or how people respond to stress can, for instance, really shine light on how they did in the past. But I also think that it doesn't mean you need to abandon trying to understand it on their own terms, either. Certainly the power of historical categories of mental illness, and the way people describe their conditions at the time, influenced the way they understood those conditions to be a, I guess, a species with many languages, that language shapes our perception and the way we think about things. So I think it's important to do both . It's great to think about these conditions in modern terms, but also to go back and to understand how people at the time thought about it.

KIMBERLY JONES  

Throughout our talk today, you have highlighted the challenge to writing about the histories of the past, particularly when they involve enslaved and free black people. But another concerning question is how do we express the fullness of enslaved people's lives, while also remaining constant, I think, and our critique of power, especially when we talk about agency, because as you know, enslaved and free life, people in many places in the 19th century could not vote and they could not really express their will through political action. Can you talk more about those archives and the challenge to write it through along with the grain?

SEAN M. SMITH

Well, I think you've done a great job of laying out the problems with it and all the different ways we can deal with it. I tend to be someone in my own research who I guess you do try to say I tend to write with the grain, I guess, in the sense that I'm trying to understand historical people in their own terms, because a lot of times I think that those ways are sort of lost to us. A lot of times the way people think in the past, doesn't on face value make any sense at all. And it takes quite a bit of work to figure out why they had those crazy ideas, and why those ideas often have much more sane power than I would like to think about and for me, right? A lot of that is theorizing about ideas of race, right, which is a category that emerges well, when it emerges is a huge debate. But it's an important category related to slavery, that slavery definitely at the very least reinforced, probably didn't create. Totally. But one of the things I really like about this collection, we've put together about all the different essays in medicine and healing the slavery issue, get sort of the range of perspectives you're talking about. 

You get some people, for instance, Lauren Derby, who has talked about the healing stones, she's really she has a very anthropological method. She's really connecting a whole lot of dots about the way different cultures work in a very nuanced and complicated way to make a case for the origin of these ideas and their persistence. And that's almost like falling through the board rather than even reading against the grain. It's, it's going incredibly deep to understand the way people at different times have thought. And then you have some of the other people I've talked about doing more sort of going against the grain reading like Elise Mitchell, and we talked about how her work is trying to rethink feigning and saying that we've taken the written record too seriously, right? Because it's too much of the enslavers perspective, and not enough of the enslaved perspective. Dierdre Cooper Owens chapters also doing something similar and in trying to uncover these experiences of the enslaved people right who had had traumatic experiences but didn't didn't get to express them directly in any way. But especially the later chapters of the book that are more structured around the medical profession. Chapters by Rana Hogarth and Leslie Schwann and Timothy Lockley, those are all more about the way that the medical profession uses racialized knowledge in different ways. And those you might say, are more sort of along the grain readings, right? It's more about recovering that historic use of power, like you mentioned, it is less about contesting that power, but rather the way that power was deployed. And so sort of, like I said, with your earlier question about, well, do we want to understand medicine? And in current terms, or are past terms, I think all of these things are useful, right? We can, we can read sources, understand, we can read the same sources really to understand how power worked, how power was contested. And also to uncover sort of the assumptions in those sources about just sort of about the way the world works in general. So I think all of those projects are very useful. And really, as historian I like to see all of those perspectives because I think together, they build a much richer history of the past,

KIMBERLY JONES  

Have you ever come across an image or document in the archives that you were like, Aha. This is it, shows a really good example of something you've been wrestling with.

SEAN M. SMITH

For me, the hardest part of my research is that everybody uses these climatic racial ideas that I described earlier. But it's because they're so widely held, they don't do it in much depth. So I'm constantly finding, oh, here's a sentence, here's a sentence, here's a paragraph, but you know, I'm reading hundreds of pages often to find one reference or two. And so I very rarely have those aha moments when I find them. I'm like, Oh, finally, but probably, probably the best version of that that I ever did have, was in a history of the Americas. Or I think it was an English conversation, the Americas, and this book was published in 1755. So for us, it's not history for them, but, but to them, they were writing the history. But one of the chapters in my dissertation talks about how these climatic racial ideas, were used to argue about whether or not slavery should be legalized in the colony of Georgia. And very few people realize this, but Georgia was the first colony to ever really attempt banning slavery. In any English colony, the Americans, and in slavery was actually illegal there for almost 20 years. The chapter that I wrote about colonial Georgia is really about how most of the argument about slavery in Georgia wasn't about slavery, it was about all the other things around slavery. It's right. So what is the goals for the colony? Right? How important is it to be used for defense versus economic production and things like that. But when slavery ultimately gets legalized in Georgia, it becomes used as proof that you need African slaves to work in places like the American South. And so in this, this history I was talking about a second ago from 1755. So just like four years after slavery is legalized in Georgia, in this book, it has a line, that's something to the effect of. There's something wrong with the way they design the colony, of course, you need slaves. They're basically that's my very quick gloss on it from memory. But somebody's written in this one copy of the book that I happen to read in little margins. And I can't tell you exactly when this was written. But I will say it looks like 18th, early 19th century writing, somebody's written in, this is wrong. The problem with Georgia was it was too close to Spanish, Florida, which is the whole point I was trying to make in the chapter, right? That there's these two perspectives and they don't agree. And so it's really sort of amazing. When you find in the marginalia a copy of the book, somebody is making your argument for you. So that was probably my biggest Whoa moment in the archives ever.

KIMBERLY JONES  

Yeah. That's interesting. That is pretty cool.

SEAN M. SMITH

Yeah, I have to say I use the picture of that page in every talk I give about that subject, because it's just right there.

KIMBERLY JONES  

I'm sure it's in the book, right. Maybe the chapter on Georgia. 

SEAN M. SMITH

Oh, in

the book I'm writing Yes. Unfortunately, it's not in the edited volume. But

KIMBERLY JONES  

I want to talk more about the archives. Because as you know, many historians in slavery scholars of slavery are increasingly reflecting on the harm of the archive and how we can navigate what we know to be true of the ways that the archives are constructed through power in silence alongside their ability to provide the necessary knowledge to write about enslaved people, while also attempting to subvert that power and subvert the violence of the archive. Can we subvert the bounds of the archive?

SEAN M. SMITH

I think the short answer for me is no. But we can try. And I think that trying is Important ultimately, you know, as you're referring to the archive, which is really, you know, if we, if we get down to the materiality, are a bunch of documents in different places all over the world. But those those kinds of documents, especially in the Atlantic slave societies that we're talking about, are almost all written byenslavers, people in power, who have a vested interest in slavery. And so it's all from their perspective, or at least filtered through their perspective. And we can never undo that, right, we can never, outside of inventing a time machine, we can never go back in time, and go ask those enslaved people what their lives are like, right, or what they thought about a certain circumstance. So in that way, that violence is permanent. Right, we've cut them off from being able to speak for themselves, we've cut enslaved people off for being able to speak for themselves. But we, as historians, and other types of scholars, can, you know, as we've talked about before, try to read through that right to still try to piece together what their lives were like from other sources, we may not get the first hand account, but maybe we can learn about, you know, their family, their religious choices the way they they thought about their health, and, and the relationship to other people. And I guess my perspective is that that's a wonderful thing to do, a helpful thing to do, we just have to acknowledge that it can never be done perfectly. And in some ways that's not different from any other historical work, because we're always trying to read between, between the lines within the grain across the grain through the grain, you know, because nobody's perfectly reliable. Nobody's a perfectly reliable witness. But I think, you know, I think slavery, that's particularly true just because of the extreme power imbalance, being able to create sources and to keep them and so. So I think we should keep trying, and doing our best with it.

KIMBERLY JONES  

Okay, this is almost the final question. Are there any histories or narratives that connect to our speaker series, theme medicine, race and democracy that you would have liked to have read? Or include and medicine and healing in the age of slavery?

SEAN M. SMITH

I'll point out a couple of things that I've really enjoyed reading lately. And maybe that's a way of answering your question. One is, oh, no, I'm gonna totally forget the name of this. Jim Downes has a new book out in Jim Downes, probably, almost 10 years ago, wrote a great book called sick from freedom, which is really about the way that the US government really, really failed to help African Americans deal with emancipation during the Civil War, and how a lot of African Americans got sick and died, basically, from lack of care in that moment, but he's written a new book that's just come out called maladies of Empire, which is about the way that the construction of modern epidemiology is, in part comes out of historical experiences with Empire and, and slavery. And I think it's a very interesting book. And I think it's another way of thinking about a lot of these topics that we've talked about today. I've also really enjoyed reading. Well enjoy might be the wrong word, because it's, it's often sort of depressing. But I think there's some really great work on the history of disability and slavery that's come out recently. Jennifer Barclay has written a book in the last few years. And so does Stephanie hunt Kennedy. And both of those books talk about that connection between ideas of disability and slavery. I think they're making some very important points about the way that those concepts are more intertwined than we would have realized in the past.

KIMBERLY JONES  

On a related point, I want to ask you as well, what are you reading right now?

SEAN M. SMITH

Right now, I am working on a a chapter about the afterlife of these climatic racial ideas I've talked about after slavery, especially in the British Empire. What I mean specifically is that both in the British Empire in the United States, people called quote unquote coolies were used as sort of replacement labor, labor for free people. But that definition of Cooley is terribly wide. And ambiguous, essentially, it means both Southeast Asian people, basically from India, but also people from China being used to work on plantations in the Caribbean in the American South, often growing sugar, but sometimes, rice and other other things too. And so I've been reading a lot of background on that and trying to catch up. I think, so far, the best book on that that I thought was really great from a few years ago. It's called Coolies and cane, about the experience of especially Chinese workers coming to Louisiana to grow sugar. I would really recommend that as a starting point because it really demonstrates the way that these categories of labor, a desire for labor, are getting used to create race, and including blackness and whiteness. 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Yeah,it's a wide range, right? We have to keep up to date. 

SEAN M. SMITH

Well, I try. 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Thank you. This conversation has been fabulous. And I'll give you the last word. 

SEAN M. SMITH

Well, really, I like to say thanks for including me today. It's been a great conversation, and I look forward to reading more of your work as it comes out.

KIMBERLY JONES  

Thank you. That has been another session of the medicine, race and democracy lab Speaker Series, tune into more conversations.

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CREDITS:

Hosted by Kimberly Jones

Assistant Produced by Jason Lee and Lauren Ginn

Produced by Lan A. Li

Music by Paolo Pavan