Commodities, Kinship, Enslavement, and the Making of the Atlantic World
The History Department at Duke University was honored to host Dr. Mary Hicks, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, as the featured guest of the Atlantic Worlds Workshop on Monday, September 29, 2025. Co-facilitated by Dr. Sarah Balakrishnan and Dr. Justin Leroy, the workshop brought together faculty and interdisciplinary graduate students for an engaging discussion of Dr. Hicks’ work-in-progress, “Gifts or Peças: The Commodification of African Women in the 15th and 16th Century Portuguese-Atlantic World.” Dr. Hicks, a distinguished historian of the Black Atlantic and recipient of numerous honors, including the Jefferson Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and the Mamolen Fellowship at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, focuses on transnational “histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration, and the making of the early modern world.”[1]
Hicks’ research, which is situated in the pre-sugar and pre-industrial period, exposes violence embedded in early commercial and diplomatic relations. Drawing on manumissions and sale archives, Dr. Hicks emphasizes the ways in which African women’s lives were entangled in systems of kinship, diplomacy, and commerce during the early centuries of Atlantic exchange. Hicks’ explanation of “gift-giving” between African and Portuguese elites revealed how diplomatic gestures could disguise acts of coercion and commodification, transforming social relationships into instruments of political and economic power and enslavement. Discussions among participants also focused on the intersection of race and religion in shaping freedom, diplomacy and kinship, and the gendered foundations of early Atlantic commerce. The figure of Fatima, an African woman whose fragmented archival presence anchors part of Dr. Hicks’ research, prompted further reflection on the meanings of agency, translation, and survival in contexts of captivity and conversion. Furthermore, Hicks emphasized the necessity of reading against the grain of early modern archives to recover enslaved women’s voices from a historiography long dominated by merchants, masters, pirates, and traffickers.
