This is a great book.Because I do not know anything about this. These two brothers who were royalty in africa went on the ship which was part of the east indian company from england. They were sold into slavery in Jamaica.And it tells the tell how they went about trying to get their freedom. This was interesting because they talked about the slave trade out of south africa with the portuguese and the dutch and the english. In jamaica was very interesting because they had slaves there too on the sugar plantations. It was not easy for them. They tried hard for their freedom and they were finally able to get to england to plead their case. I can't imagine being one way of living and then all of a sudden.You are forced to live another way I Living. It was interesting how they talked about the different ships as well.In the book , things do not go well sometimes. As they were trying to get to england their ship was wrecked , but they managed to survive , but their warrior did not. It was interesting when they got to london and they saw how everybody was living and it was an eye opener. This is a great book.I think it should be taught In high school and in college because this is another side of the slave trade and it gives it interesting fact to it

Writing on slave history is understandably difficult, especially when the voices are lost to time or go unrecorded. On one hand, O'Neill claims that the Princes were in control, that they were the exceptional manipulators; telling the British exactly what they needed to hear to go home. On the other hand O'Neill portrays Princes as having been pawns in a scheme for gold, conversion and the slave trade.

However the latter point definitively outweighs the former, at least until Prince John returned to Mpfumo. As soon as they arrive in Jamaica, the princes disappear behind the nameless multitude. We never experience their enslavement on the individual level. The reader learns more about the white captain who sold them, the white masters who bought them, the white lawyer who "freed" them and the white nobility who funded and fêted them. It's an increasingly one sided perspective.

But even if the Princes' fate was being decided at almost at every turn, that doesn't make them any less important. It's almost impossible to maintain one's agency when one is up against a powerful, global institution. We'd like to think that every slave held fast and strong, but the reality is much more complicated than that. O'Neill forces a narrative of inspiration, teasing out any supportive scrap that they can. But Prince John and Prince James - their real names unknown - were not the first, or the last and they deserve to have their story told as is, unbeholden to any one.

This book was more history of the slave trade in Eastern Africa, and attitudes by the British that uses the Princes James and John as the event to jump off from rather than being about them and their personal stories. The book just wasn’t a compelling read, imo.

4.5

How can one rate book like this? It’s not a story one can really weave to appeal to the readers senses. Though it is about two princes, they are so anonymous and the information comes from the others’ accounts, it does not really feel like there are any protagonists, though there are numerous adversaries. The story is both absurd and obscure.

That the author was able to piece together so much information is quite remarkable. The amount of information lost to history shows us just how amazing it is for information to be found. It always amazes me that people wrote and kept journals and that so many letters found their way into the archives. Everyone, it seems, wrote. That’s actually quite false as the majority could not read or write. That is why so much information in history is skewed towards the opinions of the wealthy.

To some degree, I do wish that the story had not been outlined in the introduction and left as more of a surprise, though there are so many questions left to be answered. It’s also difficult for those of us in the modern world or even after the invention of the telegraph, or the phone, or an industrial revolution that brought much faster transportation, to imagine not having those tools of convenience that would have changed so much of the story. The ship that the Prince’s boarded from London was still only immediately off the coast of England weeks after their departure. The ships then made all sorts of stops in places that seemed so out of the way, especially for such slow moving transportation.

It all baffles the mind. But the most baffling is how this could be. How could Africans supply the enslaved people that the British or whomever bought or were traded for? In these cases, nobody from Europe was roaming across Africa and kidnapping its people to serve as slaves. They were provided.

The book is amazingly researched and, fortunately, not too long – the bibliography takes up almost a third of the book – and it’s so chock full of facts and quotes. There are many different spellings and unfamiliar words that it took a while to read a page with stumbling through the interspersed quotations with archaic spellings, looking up words or places, or just processing the information. I have been to the slave Castle at Almina, mentioned once in the book, and it was the most frightening and despicable historic place I have seen. It really brought that aspect of the slave trade home. These things are hard to think about, but necessary to share, especially as people try to deny their existence. That’s one way to ensure that history repeats itself.

Thank you to Lindsay O’Neill, NetGalley, and University of Pennsylvania Press for providing me with a free advanced copy of this book for my unbiased review.

In 1716, Prince James and Prince John from Mpfumo (today's Maputo, the capital of Mozambique) board an East India Company ship. They're supposed to travel to England but find themselves enslaved in Jamaica. After two years, they are freed by a lawyer and travel to England where they live for several years before James takes his own life and John moves back to Africa.
This book tells parts of the mens' stories as told through historical records. Readers won't get a first-person account from John and James. The men either never wrote about their lives or the records are lost. As usual, the documents that remain are told from a slanted viewpoint from white men.
Beyond the story of these men, readers discover details about slavery and colonization in the 1700s. The author provides numerous accounts and information about how the British, Dutch, Portuguese, and even Africans sought to dominate cities, countries and continents. I found those details interesting, but they are plentiful and can be dry sometimes.
The extensive notes at the end of the book invite readers to explore the book's information further.

I learned SO much about this time period that I thought I had a decent understanding on. I had no idea bout the lives of Prince James and Prince John (anglicanized names) and their circumstances that brought them from their home Mpfumo (in present day Mozambique) to Jamaica, to England, to Brazil, and back to Mpfumo. Most of the records we have for their story comes from letters and historical documents between Europeans, rather than by their own accounts.

The two princes were promised a trip abroad by English tradesman in hopes of securing good trade relations with the British. However, their journey was cut short as they were then sold to slaveholders in Jamaica. It took them six years to get back home again, after years of slavery and then being novelties for the British.

Their story while unique really highlighted the politics and "rules" of slavery during that time period and how over time it evolved to what we view as modern slavery.

At times I felt the writing was repetative but overall really well done! I appreciated the footnotes, maps, and included images.

Thank you to NetGalley and the University of Pennsylvania Press for a copy of this arc in exchange for my honest review.

This book tells a fascinating story: two princes of Mpfumo (now Maputo, the capital of Mozambique) board a ship bound for Europe, but are instead betrayed and enslaved in Jamaica. They manage to talk themselves out of slavery (it takes two years) and onto a ship bound for London, and survive its wreckage of the ship during a hurricane. Eventually one of them actually makes it back to Mpfumo. We don't, unfortunately, have much of the princes' own words (or even their real names--they were baptized Prince James and Prince John, and that's how they are known in the historical record if they are named at all), but O'Neill has diligently traced them and their journeys and what's uncovered is enough to keep readers deeply engaged. O'Neill also carefully fills in the context, especially concerning the East Indian Company and Royal African Company. This is an academic volume, but one that's accessible and interesting to the general reader--I certainly didn't know much about this topic when I began reading.

Thanks to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for my free earc in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are all my own.

I am voluntarily leaving my honest review.

This book was short, interesting, and informative. It is heartbreaking that we will never truly know the names of these two princes. Their renaming and the loss of their original identity are also heartbreaking. Ugh! I must say the author did a great job of researching materials and piecing this story together.

I am not a typical non-fiction reader, but this was enjoyable.

Thank you, Netgalley, University of Pennsylvania Press, and Lindsay O'Neill, for the ARC of this informative book.

The early eighteenth century was one in which the trans-Atlantic trade was just getting started. Old power players in maritime trade, such as the Royal African Company, the East India Company were looking either to cement their power or expand it to new regions. The profitability of enslaved Africans was slowing expanding on the notions of slavery as a race based conditions. Into this changing world historian Lindsay O'Neill chronicles the story of two young princes of an eastern African region, Mpfumo, as they travel across the Atlantic world on a trading mission that goes horribly wrong. The story is a fascinating one, and O'Neill's scholarship is clearly evident in the copious footnotes at the end of the book. Her monograph's readability, however, is also clearly evident, and the text is punctuated with beautiful historical illustrations that bring life to the people and places that are chronicles in this text.

My sincere thanks to the powers that be at Netgalley, the publisher, and the author herself for this early opportunity read. My opinions are my own.

How Brits Manipulated Enslavement Narratives for Their Enrichment

“Account of two eighteenth-century princes from East Africa, their travels, and their encounters with the British Empire and slavery. In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead, their perfidious captain sold them into slavery in Jamaica. After two years of pleading their case, the princes—known in the historical record as Prince James and Prince John—convinced a lawyer to purchase them, free them, and travel with them to London. The lawyer perished when a hurricane wrecked their ship, but the princes survived and arrived in England in 1720. Even though the East India Company had initially thought that the princes might assist in their aspirations to develop a trade for gold in East Africa and for enslaved labor in Madagascar, its interest waned. The princes would need to look elsewhere to return home. It was at this point that members of the Royal African Company and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge took up their cause, in the hope that profit and perhaps Christian souls would follow. John would make it home, but tragically, James would end his own life just before the ship sailed for Africa…” This is a very dramatic blurb. One of the reasons British history includes many such neatly narrated stories is because British ghostwriters tended to fabricate such accounts to serve unique profiteering purposes. In my forthcoming re-attribution series, I explain how travelogues such as “William Dampier’s” New Voyage Round the World (1703) were ghostwritten (in the case of “Dampier” by Peter Shaw (1694-1763), who probably also fabricated this two-princes story) for lawyers representing investors in shipping voyages, wherein “exploration” was used as an excuse to hide the slave-trade, or piracy (perhaps relabeled as privateering) or other corruptions and manipulations. It is likely there was no “lawyer” or a second brother, and other claims in this narrative should be questioned. The Brits even forged documents related to such voyages that they popularized in books about such adventures. So, taking on researching this specific story is a tough undertaking indeed. This is why it is troubling that this blurb does not mention the sources that first described these events.
So, I turned to the “Notes” section at the end of the book to figure this out. The 3rd note for this preface confirms some of my suspicions: “I am engaging a small piece of ‘critical fabulation’ through the use of ‘restrained imagination.’ The archive that tells the princes’ story often excludes details about them, treating them as objects.” The problem is that by turning facts such as that at 10pm Prince James “hanged himself in his garters” into a full narrative with vivid details serves the same function as “Dampier’s” dramatic propagandistic narrative: it gives life to what might have been a false, or fictitious minor point. After the details are added, it is like planting a false-memory of this history being a vivid truth in the readers’ minds. One source mentioned is the Royal African Company minutes, which were manipulated by ghostwriters with a profiteering agenda. The one early book mentioned is “Thomas Bray’s” Missionalia: Or, A Collection of Missionary Pieces Relating to the Conversaion of the Heathens; Both the African Negroes and American Indians (1727). This was obviously another one of Shaw’s projects. Europeans “won” the colonizing and enslaving war with propaganda such as this, instead of by fighting military battles that its tiny naval forces could not have possibly won. It is important to re-examine the fictions the Brits told about themselves, but it is also important to avoid trusting their sources while trying to re-evaluate their claims. Though the confession that some of the text is what the author imagined and not what the sources said is a good sign that signals most of this book is probably based on the sources, even if they are embellished.
“…Blurs the boundaries between the Atlantic and Indian ocean worlds; reveals the intertwined networks, powerful individuals, and unstable knowledge that guided British attempts at imperial expansion; and illuminates the power of African polities, which decided who lived and who died on their coasts. Lindsay O’Neill is Associate Professor (Teaching) of History at the University of Southern California…”
This book opens with a useful map of the described journey. Most of the book is handled with a fitting degree of details that summarize relevant court cases, quote passages from documents, and explain the history behind the narrative. This is a good book to read through for researchers in this field, and for graduate students who are studying related topics.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of the book in exchange for an honest review.

I had hoped that this book would inform me about specific cases of the experiences of the slave trade, but this turned out to be a story about 2 brothers who never really came alive to me. I have to admit I grudgingly finished this book. 2 stars

The Two Princes of Mpfumo was a very interesting book. I enjoy books that further educate me and provide a good story, this book did not disappoint. It is a well researched story of not only the two princes but also of the time and included many interesting facts about the Royal African Trading Company, slavery, Madagascar and more. I would highly recommend this book if you are interested in past relations between England and African tribes.

A pretty amazing and well researched book. Approximately 200 pages, including 52 pages of notes.

Two "princes" went from Southern Africa (on the east side of the continent) to Madagascar to Jamaica to UK and then back to Africa with a stop in Brazil ... and this happened from about 1716 to 1723. To have unraveled this story is pretty amazing.

There is a lot of interesting history in this book, like how the trading companies manipulated wording in the contracts and would turn a blind eye to slave trading. And how the princes also (likely) turned a blind eye during transport. And how the princes handled themselves and lived in London.

The British did their best to teach the princes to read and write and become civilized and Christian.

Debating between 4 and 5 stars. Deciding to round up to 5 stars, because I felt that I learned somethings about this time period that I'd either missed or hadn't fully realized. The Two Princes of Mpfumo was quite interesting and worth reading, especially if you like non-fiction/history.

Honestly ... I didn't read the notes.

Many thanks to NetGalley and University of Pennsylvania Press for the opportunity to read the advance read copy of The Two Princes of Mpfumo in exchange for an honest review. Expected publication date is Feb 13, 2025.

As a resident of East Africa this was such an interesting historical account! As a slave narrative it was hard to read but so necessary. Though we do not know the real names of the two prince's it is good to at least have their story retold in honour of their struggle and others like them.

I had never heard about this before and was excited to learn about something that I never heard of before. I was engaged with the story being told and thought the overall concept was well done. It felt like it was researched well and glad I was able to learn about this. Lindsay O'Neill has a strong writing style and hope to read more from the author.