Episode 111: From the Vault: "They Mean to Take Us as a Prize": Master and Commander with Dr. Mary Hicks

Historians At The Movies

This week we reach back into the archive for our first visit from Dr. Mary Hicks to talk about the brilliance of Master and Commander and to talk with Mary about her research into African Mariners in the South Atlantic.
About our guest:
Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.