Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (Nueva York, Picador, 2015).

In 1804, Captain Amasa Delano anchored his ship, the Perseverance, in a lonely island near the Chilean coast. In the distance, he spotted another ship stranded in deplorable conditions and decided to help her. It flew no flag. Delano boarded the Tryal, as it read from the outside, with caution and met its captain: Benito Cerreño, a Spanish man backed by his loyal African slaves, Babo and Mori. The apparent devotion and dedication of the slaves toward their master struck Delano, an abolitionist from Massachusetts: they refused to leave him alone at all times. But then, as Cerreño babbled some words of warning, the ruse collapsed. Delano finally figured out that the Tryal’s slaves commanded the ship, and not the man who introduced himself as its master. They seized control of the ship, killed most of its white crew, and decided to deceive the world: play business as usual to secure their survival. 

In The Empire of Necessity, Greg Grandin traces the historical forces and events that led to this elaborate charade. Through the personal account of Amasa Delano, the slave rebellion on the Tryal in 1804 inspired writers like Chilean poet Pablo Neruda or Herman Melville’s short fiction “Benito Cerreño.” In the book, the revolt serves as a pretext to explore the complex, intricate history of transatlantic slavery, politics, and revolution. To explain why those two ships met in that place, at that time, as well as why that rebellion took place there (and why it interested Melville), Grandin examines the stories behind the ships, their captains, the island, the slavers, and the slaves. To recreate these narratives, Grandin traced, on the one hand, the large historical processes (revolution, trade, state-building, and slavery) that structured these events and, on the other, the contingency (choices, deceit, mundane needs, enmities, and friendships) that determined how they played out.

Using Melville’s novella as an anchor throughout the book, Grandin merges literary, political, and historical analyses to render a series of compelling, interconnected narratives around a single event filled with conflict, violence, freedom, and deceit. Because of its fragmented, kaleidoscopic narrative structure, The Empire of Necessity necessarily blurs the unstable boundaries between literature and history, yet it reads and feels like a journey itself.