My Research and Teaching Interests center on Africans and their descendants in the broader world. I teach courses on comparative slavery, race and nation in the Atlantic world, comparative world history, the history of Brazil, and the history of South Africa. To date, my research has concentrated on the social and cultural histories of Africans in the Atlantic world. My next project will focus on the international dimensions of slavery in the United States. I have also begun several research projects related to South Africa.
Education
Ph.D., The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York;
M.A., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
B.A., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Books
Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World
James Sweet. Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. Oxford University Press, 2025.
The dramatic story of a mutiny aboard an eighteenth-century British ship and how its owners effectively rallied the power of the British Crown to protect their investment and expand their wealth and political power across multiple generations. In 1768, the British slave ship Black Prince, departed the port of Bristol, bound for West Africa. It never arrived. Before reaching Old Calabar, the crew mutinied, murdering the captain and his officers. The mutineers renamed the ship Liberty, elected new officers, and set out for Brazil. By the time the ship arrived there, the crew had disintegrated into a violent mob and fired into the port city. After the Black Prince wrecked off the coast of Hispaniola, the rebels fled to outposts around the Atlantic world. An eight-year manhunt ensued. This book follows the crew’s turn to piracy and the merchant-owners’ response to the uprising. At the very moment that the American Revolution unfolded in North America, the Black Prince’s owners conducted a “shadow” revolution, mobilizing the power of the British Crown to seek justice and restitution on their behalf. These private merchants used state surveillance, policing, extradition, capital punishment, international diplomacy, and even warfare in order to protect their wealth. During an era of professed liberty and freedom, the privatization of state power was already emerging, replacing monarchies with corporate oligarchies, presaging a new kind of political power in the Atlantic world. The eighteenth-century Bristol slave merchants and subsequent generations of their families accrued great fortunes from the trade and invested it in early British banks, railroads, insurance companies, industrial manufacturing, and even the Anglican Church. Mutiny on the Black Prince narrates the dramatic story of the events onboard and the merchant owners’ efforts to capture the rebels from around the Atlantic world, as well as the way that British slavery shaped the industrializing Atlantic economy and the evolution of the modern corporate state.
Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World
James Sweet. Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Between 1730 and 1750, powerful healer and vodun priest Domingos Álvares traversed the colonial Atlantic world like few Africans of his time–from Africa to South America to Europe–addressing the profound alienation of warfare, capitalism, and the African slave trade through the language of health and healing. In Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, James H. Sweet finds dramatic means for unfolding a history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which healing, religion, kinship, and political subversion were intimately connected.
The African Diaspora and the Disciplines
James Sweet, and Tejumola Olaniyan (Co-editor). The African Diaspora and the Disciplines. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Focusing on the problems and conflicts of doing African diaspora research from various disciplinary perspectives, these essays situate, describe, and reflect on the current practice of diaspora scholarship. Tejumola Olaniyan, James H. Sweet, and the international group of contributors assembled here seek to enlarge understanding of how the diaspora is conceived and explore possibilities for the future of its study. With the aim of initiating interdisciplinary dialogue on the practice of African diaspora studies, they emphasize learning from new perspectives that take advantage of intersections between disciplines. Ultimately, they advocate a fuller sense of what it means to study the African diaspora in a truly global way.
Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770
James Sweet. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Exploring the cultural lives of African slaves in the early colonial Portuguese world, with an emphasis on the more than one million Central Africans who survived the journey to Brazil, James Sweet lifts a curtain on their lives as Africans rather than as incipient Brazilians. Focusing first on the cultures of Central Africa from which the slaves came–Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo, and others–Sweet identifies specific cultural rites and beliefs that survived their transplantation to the African-Portuguese diaspora, arguing that they did not give way to immediate creolization in the New World but remained distinctly African for some time. Slaves transferred many cultural practices from their homelands to Brazil, including kinship structures, divination rituals, judicial ordeals, ritual burials, dietary restrictions, and secret societies. Sweet demonstrates that the structures of many of these practices remained constant during this early period, although the meanings of the rituals were often transformed as slaves coped with their new environment and status. Religious rituals in particular became potent forms of protest against the institution of slavery and its hardships. In addition, Sweet examines how certain African beliefs and customs challenged and ultimately influenced Brazilian Catholicism. Sweet’s analysis sheds new light on African culture in Brazil’s slave society while also enriching our understanding of the complex process of creolization and cultural survival.
Selected Publications
- “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora.” The American Historical Review 114 (2009): 279-306.
Advisor To
- John Balz
- Mintah Danquah
- Valentina Tetteh
- Jacob Keiser
- Quintin Kies
History Courses
- History 200 – Historical Studies
- History 277 – Africa: An Introductory Survey
- History 278 – Africans in the Americas, 1492-1808 – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
- History 279 – Afro-Atlantic Histories and Peoples, 1808-Present
- History 525 – World & The West from 1492
- History 555 – History of Brazil
- History 600 – African Diaspora Peoples and History
- History 600 – The Image of Africa in the West.
- History 751 – Pro-seminar in History of Africa
- History 861 – African Diaspora Histories and Peoples
- History 861 – History of South Africa