Manuel Barcia Wins Paul E. Lovejoy Book Prize
The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020) wins this year’s Paul E. Lovejoy Prize in the field of slavery.
Congratulations to Professor Manuel Barcia, Chair of Global History at Leeds, for winning this prize announced by the Journal of Global Slavery.
In The Yellow Demons of Fever, Manuel Barcia not only investigates disease as an overlooked horror of the Atlantic slave trade during the age of abolition, but also makes a compelling argument about the scope of the medical practitioners, both European and African and African-descended peoples, that were deeply involved in its cure and containment. Among the other strengths of this book is Barcia’s ability to amass disparate sources across the circum-Atlantic to lucidly reconstruct and advance our understanding of the medical history of the Atlantic slave trade in ways that would inspire future scholars for generations to come.
