Pharmaceutical Captivity, Epistemological Rupture, and the Business Archive of the British Slave Trade
研究英国奴隶贸易中的药物维度，通过解读奴隶船药物发票，揭示囚禁与药物的关系，为关注被奴役者生活的学者提供新视角。
The archival record of the transatlantic slave trade poses a methodological challenge to researchers who wish to center the lives of enslaved people in their scholarship. In more recent years, such archival scrutiny has evolved into its own vibrant field of inquiry concerning the politics of the archive. This article contributes to this burgeoning field by studying the pharmaceutical dimensions of the British slave trade and examining the underexplored relationship between captivity and drugs that articulated across the Atlantic world. By performing three different readings of a slave ship drug invoice—as a textual artifact, epistemic argument, and narrative of loss—I argue that the drug invoice stimulates new illness narratives of captive Africans in the historiography of the British slave trade.