Resources

The bibliography below isn't exhaustive, but it rounds up some key works on the connection between religion and slavery. It's organized into different sections for easy exploration. It's meant to be a handy resource for anyone diving into the fascinating interplay of religion and slavery in the Atlantic world.

Slavery (General)

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998)

Randy M. Browne, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (2017)

Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (2004)

Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (2015)

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, (1966)

Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (1972)

David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010)

Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2014)

Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington, and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British Slave-ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (2014)

Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning With Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (2021)

Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998)

Sowande M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (2016)

Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (2013)

Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (2008)

Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2007)

Jason T. Sharples, The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America (2020)

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 2nd edition (1998)

African Religions

Ibigbolade S. Aderibigbe and Toyin Falola, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Traditional African Religion (2022)

Jean Allman and John Parker, Tongnaab: The History of a West African God (2005)

Joseph Omosade Awolalu, “What Is African Traditional Religion?.” Studies in Comparative Religion 10, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 1-10.

William Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa (1969)

Robert M. Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (1999)

Stephen D. Glazier, ed., The Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions (2001)

Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (1998)

Sandra Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (2002)

Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (2005)

Heinz Kimmerle, "The world of spirits and the respect for nature: towards a new appreciation of animism" The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa 2, no. 2 (April 2006): 1-15.

J. Lorand Matory, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (2018)

Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Traditions (2010)

Jacob K. Olupona, African Religions: A Very Short Introduction (2014)

William Pietz, The Problem of the Fetish (2022)

African and African American Christianity

Richard J. Boles. “Documents Relating To African American Experiences Of White Congregational Churches In Massachusetts, 1773-1832.” The New England Quarterly 86, no. 2 (2013): 310-23

Joan C. Bristol, “‘Although I am black, I am beautiful’: Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla,” in Nora E. Jaffary, ed., Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas (2007): 67-80.

James F. Cooper, “Cuffee’s ‘Relation’: A Faithful Slave Speaks Through The Project For The Preservation Of Congregational Church Records.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 86, no. 2, 2013: 293-310.

Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of the Kongo (2014)

Richard Gray, Black Christians and White Missionaries (1990)

David Maxwell, “Freed Slaves, Missionaries and Respectability: The Expansion of the Christian Frontier from Angola to Belgian Congo.” Journal of African History 54, no. 1 (2013): 79–102.

Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, updated edition (2004)

Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (2001)

Erik R. Seeman. “‘Justise Must Take Plase’: Three African Americans Speak of Religion in Eighteenth-Century New England.” The William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 393–414.

Jon Sensbach, “Prophets and Helpers: African American Women and the Rise of Black Christianity in the Age of the Slave Trade,” in Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, eds., Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600-1800) (2009): 115-135.

James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (2003)

John K. Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750.” Journal of African History 25, no. 2 (1984): 147–167.

John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (1998)

John K. Thornton, “Afro-Christian Syncretism in the Kingdom of the Kongo.” Journal of African History 54 (2013): 53–77.

John K. Thornton and Linda M. Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (2007)

Anglicanism

Nicholas M. Beasley, Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650-1780 (2009)

Vincent Carretta and Ty M. Reese, eds., The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, the First African Anglican Missionary (2012)

John W. Catron, Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World (2016)

Mark Chapman, Anglicanism: A Very Short Introduction (2006)

Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (1998)

Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (2019)

Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (2012)

Travis Glasson, “‘Baptism doth not bestow Freedom’: Missionary Anglicanism, Slavery, and the Yorke Talbot Opinion, 1701-30,” William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 2 (April 2010): 279-318

Jerome S. Handler, “A Rare Eighteenth-Century Tract in Defense of Slavery in Barbados: The Thoughts of the Rev. John Duke, Curate of St. Michael,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society LI (2005): 58-65

B. W. Higman, Proslavery Priest: The Atlantic World of John Lindsay, 1729-1788 (2011)

Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600- 2000 (2006)

Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (2009)

Andrew Porter, Religion versus empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700-1914 (2004)

Laura M. Stevens, “Why Read Sermons? What Americanists Can Learn from the Sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,” History Compass 3 (2005): 1-19

Matthew Blake Strickland, "'The Protection of Slaves and Other Property:' An Anglican Minister, Criminal Charges, and White Planters' Fears of Emancipation in Barbados," Journal of Caribbean History 55, no. 2 (December 2021): 151-175

Matthew Blake Strickland, “Anglican Baptisms of People of African Descent in Jamaica, 1669-1800.” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 5, no. 4 (Dec. 2024): 10-17.

Rowan Strong, “A Vision of an Anglican Imperialism: The Annual Sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1714,” Journal of Religious History 30, no. 2 (June 2006): 175-198

John C. Van Horne, “Impediments to the Christianization and Education of Blacks in Colonial America: The Case of the Associates of Dr. Bray,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 50, no. 3 (Sept. 1981): 243-269

Catholicism

James Axtell, "White Legend: The Jesuit Missions in Maryland," Maryland Historical Magazine 81 (Spring 1986): 1-7

Nicholas P. Cushner, "Slave Mortality and Reproduction on Jesuit Haciendas in Colonial Peru," The Hispanic American Historical Review 55, no. 2 (1975): 177-199

Nicholas P. Cushner, Lords of the Land: Sugar, Wine, and Jesuit Estates in Coastal Peru, 1600-1767 (1980)

Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism (1992)

Maura Jane Farrelly, "American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism," Early American Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 69-100

Stephan T. Lanik, "Mission Plantations, Space, and Social Control: Jesuits as Planters in French Caribbean Colonies and Frontiers," Journal of Social Archaeology 12, no. 1 (2012): 51-71

Laura Elizabeth Masur, "Priestly Plantations: An Archaeology of Capitalism and Community in British North America," PhD Dissertation, Boston University (2019)

Joan Meznar, "Our Lady of the Rosary, African Slaves, and the Struggle Against Heretics in Brazil, 1550-1660," Journal of Early Modern History 9, no. 3 (2005): 371-397

Patricia A. Mulvey, "Black Brothers and Sisters: Membership in the Black Lay Brotherhoods of Colonial Brazil," Luso-Brazillian Review 17, no. 2 (1980): 253-279

Thomas Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717-1838 (2001)

Sue Peabody, "'A Dangerous Zeal': Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles, 1635-1800," French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (2002): 53-90

Joseph S. Rossi, "Jesuits, Slaves and Scholars at 'Old Bohemia,' 1704-1756, as Found in the Woodstock Letters," U.S. Catholic Historian 26, no. 2 (2008): 1-15

Adam Rothman, "Georgetown University and the Business of Slavery," Washington History 29, no. 2 (2017): 18-22

Craig Steven Wilder, "War and Priests: Catholic Colleges and Slavery in the Age of Revolution," in Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2018): 227-242

Codrington Estates

J. Harry Bennett, Jr., Bondsmen and Bishops: Slavery and Apprenticeship on the Codrington Plantations of Barbados, 1710-1838 (1958)

J. Harry Bennett, Jr., “The Problem of Slave Labor Supply at the Codrington Plantations [part one].” Journal of Negro History 36, no. 4 (Oct. 1951): 406-441

J. Harry Bennett, Jr., “The Problem of Slave Labor Supply at the Codrington Plantations [part two],” Journal of Negro History 37, no. 2 (April 1952): 115-141

Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (2019)

Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (2012)

Frank J. Klingberg, ed., Codrington Chronicle: An Experiment in Anglican Altruism on a Barbados Plantation, 1710-1834 (1949)

Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (2013)

Creole Religions: Candomblé

Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations (1978)

Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (2005)

Beatriz Góis Dantas, Nago Grandma and White Papa: Candomblé and the Creation of Afro-Brazilian Identity (2009)

Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou to Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo 2nd Edition (2011)

Stephen D. Glazier, ed., The Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions (2001)

Rachel Harding, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (2000)

Rachel Elizabeth Harding, “É a Senzala: Slavery, Women, and Embodied Knowledge in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé,” in Ruth Marie Griffith and Barbara Dianne Savage, eds., Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance (2006): 3-18.

Paul C. Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (2002)

Lorand J. Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (2005)

Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Traditions (2010)

Bettina E. Schmidt, Spirits and Trance in Brazil: An Anthropology of Religious Experience (2016)

Laura de Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil. Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty (2003)

Jim Wafer, The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomblé (1991)

Creole Religions: Obeah

Kenneth M. Bilby and Jerome S. Handler, “Obeah: Healing and Protection in West Indian Slave Life,” Journal of Caribbean History 38, no. 2 (2004): 153-183

Randy M. Browne, “The ‘Bad Business’ of Obeah: Power, Authority, and the Politics of Slave Culture in the British Caribbean,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2011): 451-480.

Sasha Turner Bryson, “The Art of Power: Poison and Obeah Accusations and the Struggle for Dominance and Survival in Jamaica’s Slave Society,” Caribbean Studies 41, no. 2 (2013): 61-90.

Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou to Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo 2nd Edition (2011)

Katharine Gerbner, “'They call me Obea': German Moravian missionaries and Afro-Caribbean religion in Jamaica, 1754–1760," Atlantic Studies, 12, no. 2 (2015): 160-178.

Stephen D. Glazier, ed., The Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions (2001)

Jerome S. Handler, “Slave Medicine and Obeah in Barbados, circa 1650 to 1834,” New West Indian Guide 74 (2000): 57-60

Clarence V. H. Maxwell, '"The Horrid Villainy": Sarah Bassett and the Poisoning Conspiracies in Bermuda, 1727-1730', Slavery and Abolition 21, 3 (2000): 48-74

Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Traditions (2010)

Diana Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World (2015)

Diana Paton, “Obeah Acts: Producing and Policing the Boundaries of Religion in the Caribbean.” Small Axe 13, no. 1 (2009): 1-18.

Diana Paton and Maarit Forde, eds., Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (2012)

Kely Wisecup, “Knowing Obeah.” Atlantic Studies 10.3 (2013): 406-425.

Creole Religions: Santería

George Brandon, Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories (1993)

David H. Brown, Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion (2003)

Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (2005)

Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou to Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo 2nd Edition (2011)

Stephen D. Glazier, ed., The Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions (2001)

Tracey E. Hucks, “‘I Smoothed the Way, I opened Doors’: Women in the Yoruba-Orisha Tradition of Trinidad” in Ruth Marie Griffith and Barbara Dianne Savage, eds., Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance (2006): 19-36.

Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Traditions (2010)

Mercedes Cros Sandoval, Worldview, the Orichas, and Santería: Africa to Cuba and Beyond (2006)

Kristina Wirtz, Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería: Speaking a Sacred World (2007)

Creole Religions: Vodou

Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (2005)

Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (1995)

Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism (1992)

Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou to Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo 2nd Edition (2011)

David Patrick Geggus, "Haitian Voodoo in the Eighteenth Century: Language, Culture, Resistance," Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 28 (1991): 21-51.

David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (2002)

Stephen D. Glazier, ed., The Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions (2001)

Michel S. Laguerre, Voodoo and Politics in Haiti (1989)

Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Traditions (2010)

Diana Paton and Maarit Forde, eds., Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (2012)

Alasdair Pettinger, "'Eh! eh! Bomba, hen! hen!': Making Sense of a Vodou Chant," in Diana Paton and Maarit Forde, eds., Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (2012)

Islam

Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations (1978)

Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, João José Reis, and Flávio dos Santos Gomes. The Story of Rufino:  Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic. Translated by H. Sabrina Gledhill (2020)

Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslim Enslaved in the Americas (1998)

Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (1998)

João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Translated by Arthur Brakel (1995)

Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (2003)

Judaism

Aviva Ben-Ur, Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825 (2020)

David Brion Davis, "The Slave Trade and the Jews," The New York Review (22 December 1994)

Seymour Drescher, “Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn, eds., Jews and the Civil War: A Reader (2010): 51-86.

Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (1998)

Bertram W. Korn, “Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789-1865,” in Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn, eds., Jews and the Civil War: A Reader (2010): 87-122.

Jayme A. Sokolow, “Revolution and Reform: The Antebellum Jewish Abolitionists,” in Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn, eds., Jews and the Civil War: A Reader (2010): 125-144.

Moravianism

Leland Ferguson, God's Fields: Landscape, Religion, and Race in Moravian Wachovia (2011)

Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (2019)

Katharine Gerbner, “'They call me Obea': German Moravian missionaries and Afro-Caribbean religion in Jamaica, 1754–1760," Atlantic Studies, 12, no. 2 (2015): 160-178.

Jon Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840 (1998)

Jon Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (2005)

Quakerism

Michael J. Crawford, ed., The Having of Negroes is Become a Burden: The Quaker Struggle to Free Slaves in Revolutionary North Carolina (2010)

Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (2019)

Katharine Gerbner, “The Ultimate Sin: Christianising Slaves in Barbados in the Seventeenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 1 (March 2010): 57-73

Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700-1775 (2000)

Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (2018)