Rediker, Marcus
The Slave Ship: A Human History
Viking (New York)
2007
OUR SYNOPSIS: Marcus Rediker centers human experiences on the slave ships of the Middle Passage from 1700 to 1808. He tracks the dramas on these vessels involving enslaved people, captains, crews, abolitionists, and the public to show how global capitalism was built on slavery. Indeed, “The ship was thus central to a profound, interrelated set of economic changes essential to the rise of capitalism: the seizure of new lands, the expropriation of millions of people and their redeployment in growing market-oriented sectors of the economy; the mining of gold and silver, the cultivating of tobacco and sugar; the concomitant rise of long-distance commerce; and finally a planned accumulation of wealth and capital beyond anything the world had ever witnessed.” (35-36) He also argues that slave ships were simultaneously factories, prisons, and military vessels.
BIG QUESTIONS:
If historical events occur in open waters, how should we approach their sense of place?
How did trafficked enslaved people carve out space for resistance during the Middle Passage?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“A voyage into this peculiar hell begins with the human seascape, stories of the people whose lives were shaped by the slave trade. Some grew prosperous and powerful, others poor and weak. An overwhelming majority suffered extreme terror, and many died in horrific circumstances. People of all kinds—men, women, and children, black, white, and all shades in between, from Africa, Europe, and the Americas—were swept into the trade’s surreal, swirling vortex.” (17)
“In the shadow of death, the millions who made the great Atlantic passage in a slave ship forged new forms of life—new language, new means of expression, new resistance, and a new sense of community. Herein lay the maritime origins of cultures that were at once African American and Pan-African, creative and hence indestructible.” (177)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
James Field Stanfield, The Guinea Voyage: A Poem in Three Books, to Which Are Added Observations on a Voyage to the Coast of Africa (London: J. Robertson, 1807), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46990/46990-h/46990-h.htm.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
Relate to Baltimore's role in the slave trade.
