Few historians are willing to sit with a subject as unsettling as the eating of slaves and outsiders, and fewer still manage to do so without either sensationalizing the material or explaining it away. Christian Siefkes’ Edible People: The Historical Consumption of Slaves and Foreigners and the Cannibalistic Trade in Human Flesh (Berghahn Books, 2022) belongs to the rarer second category. Drawing on missionary letters, colonial officers’ diaries, ethnographic reports, and the dynastic histories of imperial China, Siefkes assembles a patient, cross-regional argument that the ritualized or commercial consumption of enslaved and captured people was neither a myth invented by colonizers nor a timeless African or Pacific pathology, but a set of practices shaped by concrete economic and social conditions, conditions that could sustain the practice, intensify it, or eventually extinguish it altogether.
New Zealand supplies the book’s opening case study, and it is instructive precisely because slavery there was not organized around plantations or markets in the Atlantic sense but around war. Māori captives who were not killed outright became slaves, and their masters retained, as more than one 19th-century observer confirmed, full power over their servants’ lives. Siefkes lets the primary witnesses carry much of the narrative weight. The British artist Augustus Earle recorded watching a returning war party bring back “human heads, human flesh, and many prisoners”; the prisoners’ fate settled the moment they were captured. The trader Joel Samuel Polack, who lived in the north of the island for two decades, described how a slave woman was killed with a blow from a tomahawk merely for eating her master’s cold meal, her body afterward “dressed, cooked, and on their arrival eaten” by the assembled guests.
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