Slaves for Peanuts

A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History

By: Jori Lewis

Narrated by: Diana Blue

Americans consume over 1.5 billion pounds of peanut products every year. But few of us know the peanut's tumultuous history, or its intimate connection to slavery and freedom.

Lyrical and powerful, Slaves for Peanuts deftly weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions. Author Jori Lewis reveals how demand for peanut oil in Europe ensured that slavery in Africa would persist well into the twentieth century, long after the European powers had officially banned it in the territories they controlled.

Delving deep into West African and European archives, Lewis recreates a world on the coast of Africa that is breathtakingly real and unlike anything modern listeners have experienced. Slaves for Peanuts is told through the eyes of a set of richly detailed characters—from an African-born French missionary harboring runaway slaves, to the leader of a Wolof state navigating the politics of French imperialism—who challenge our most basic assumptions of the motives and people who supported human bondage.

At a time when Americans are grappling with the enduring consequences of slavery, here is a new and revealing chapter in its global history.

©2022 Jori Lewis (P)2022 Tantor

Enriching History, Elegant Prose

Drawing on a wealth of research, “Slaves for Peanuts” takes us on a journey to trace how the bounty of a novel crop that many Americans today associate with baseball games, the circus or a PB&J once intertwined with war, colonialism, religion, politics and the evils of forced labor to shape countless lives in and around Senegal. The tale the journalist and historian Jori Lewis unravels is both captivating and harrowing. For me, it also was eye-opening—despite having visited Dakar some years ago, I had been ignorant of this confluence of events before Lewis’ book. I also found impressive her work contextualizing the ways in which the pernicious expansion of human bondage and the fitful transformation of peanuts into a major commodity evolved across geography, cultures and time. Indeed, much how Mark Kurlansky’s “A Basque History of the World” is a global study as much an Iberian one, Lewis’ powerful new volume grants readers a fuller understanding of West Africa, but also the Americas, Europe and beyond. Perhaps what I enjoyed most, however, was the frequency in which the author forced me to interrupt my learning to pause and admire her beautifully novelistic descriptions of past and present.

fascinating treatment of an important subject

Highly recommend this book on this very significant topic! deeply researched and meticulously written.