OI Author Conversation with Mary Hicks
May 29, 2025, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm EDT
Join Mary Hicks (University of Chicago), author of Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery (OI with partner UNC Press), in conversation with James Sweet (University of Wisconsin, Madison) online on Thursday, May 29, 2025, at NOON Eastern Time.
Mary Hicks is an historian of the Black Atlantic at the University of Chicago, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism and migration and the making of the early modern world. Her research examines the maritime dimensions of the African Diaspora, with a particular focus on eighteenth and early nineteenth century colonial Brazil. Her book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery explores the pervasive commercial and cultural influence of mariners of African descent in West Africa and Bahia. Her published work includes: “Financing the Luso-Atlantic Slave Trade: Collective Investment Practices from Portugal to Brazil, 1500-1840,” in the Journal of Global Slavery, “Transatlantic Threads of Meaning: West African Textile Entrepreneurship in Salvador da Bahia, 1770- 1870,” in Slavery & Abolition, and “Captivity’s Commerce: The Theory and Methodology of Slaving and Capitalism,” in the Business History Review.
James H. Sweet is Vilas-Jartz Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sweet’s research interests range broadly across the histories of Africa and the African diaspora. His most recent book focuses on a mutiny onboard an eighteenth-century British slave ship that eventually landed in Brazil and St. Domingue.