Winner, James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship
Winner, Harriet Tubman Prize
"A complex story crossing time and oceans" (National Public Radio), Jori Lewis's prizewinning Slaves for Peanuts deftly weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions. "With elegant prose and engaging details" (National Book Award-winner Imani Perry), 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.
"This informative and compassionate account unearths a little-known chapter in the history of slavery and European imperialism" (Publishers Weekly), recreating a world on the coast of Africa that is breathtakingly real and unlike anything modern readers have experienced. Slaves for Peanuts is "told in rich detail through the eyes of West African men and women" (Civil Eats)--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.
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.
Praise for Slaves for Peanuts:
"A rich and very readable overview of people and peanuts in nineteenth-century West Africa."
--World Literature Today "Slaves for Peanuts is a valuable addition to agricultural and West African history."
--Nature "The geopolitical game Lewis describes in Slaves for Peanuts is an old one, and one essential to the formation of the modern world."
--Africa Is a Country
"Jori Lewis's superbly readable book does more than bring life to something we all too often ignore: the history of slavery in Africa. She has also found a sort of African version of the Underground Railroad. And all of this is connected to an everyday food whose history we seldom think of."
--Adam Hochschild, journalist, historian, lecturer, and bestselling author of King Leopold's Ghost