Jennifer Morgan writes a THICK book. She does a lot of name/historiography dropping in the actual text, not just the introduction. She is concerned with the processes that divided people and economies along the distinct aces of value and commodity.

In the narrative, Morgan articulates the relationships and ideologies of the 16 and 17century that congealed in the 18th and 19th century into common sense understands that are still with us. She is concerned with the triangle of economic logic, black radical tradition and kinship as the basis of both racial formation and Blackness as enslavebility.

Morgan argues that kinship could be claimed only in freedom and Blackness signified freedom's opposite. This argument brings kinship and commodification to 17th century ideologies; it asks how the logics of racial slavery made sense to Europeans and what Africans knew about the terms of their captivity. The inability to convey kinship is the main issue here.

Morgan states there is a need to write histories that acknowledge the silences in the records as evidence of an irrecoverable w/hole. She seeks to denaturalize the system of thought that enslaved women's works were only just emerging in the early modern Black Atlantic. Kinship, motherhood, population and commodification were conceptually intertwined for slave owners and for those who were enslaved.

I enjoyed the many many themes, theories, and methods in this book but it was a lot. The first half of the book could be its own piece compared to the second half of the book.