If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (review)

The theme of black resistance has been central to the historiography of American slavery since the 1970s. Based on information pertaining to 493 instances of revolt (mainly from the English, French, and North American slave trades), Taylor's new book is the first monograph-length study to shift the analytical focus of such work from American plantations to the oceanic and riverine slave trades that peopled them.

The author has at his disposal details concerning around 100 more cases of slave-ship insurrection than other recent studies of shipboard revolts, and the book uses the data to provide a view of how slave-ship rebellions most often unfolded as well as to explain the operational details behind why the rebellions transpired as they did. The book follows pioneering quantitative studies of shipboard rebellion spurred by the initial publication of The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (tastd).¹ Taylor summarizes and augments key findings in that work concerning the importance of women in shipboard revolts, the costs of shipboard rebellion in the business of slave trading, and the influence that the regional origins of a ship's slaves had on the propensity for the outbreak of revolt.² The book also fruitfully queries some of the initial conclusions of the first studies to be based on the tastd. Taylor, for instance, argues that African rebels plotting violence on slave ships probably did execute their plans with an eye on how time of day might affect their chances (98– 101).

For the most part, however, Taylor's exertions are in the qualitative sphere, not the quantitative one. In the realm of historical narrative, one of the book's achievements is its systematic presentation of the small details involved in the unfolding of a slave revolt at sea. Historiographically, the book's intervention concerns the literature on slave resistance, whereas recent work has stressed slaveholders' success in containing, mostly though overwhelming force, their chattel's greatest ambitions (indeed, the analytical efficacy and precision of the very term resistance is more and more questioned in modern slavery studies).³

In response, Taylor argues, "The remarkable level of success that shipboard rebels attained challenges the notion that African and African American slave resistance was ineffective" (4). At one level, this is a terribly difficult point to make. The chances of rebelling slaves achieving ultimate success (their freedom) probably never surpassed their chances of their being killed in the midst of their uprising (115–116, 137).⁴ Taylor, however, proposes to define success as enslaved Africans "forcibly taking command of the slaver, even if only for a brief period" (122). Moreover, he argues that judging the ultimate success of shipboard rebellions requires accounting for the ways in which the insurrections reverberated across the Atlantic world—the cost that they imposed on slavers, the energy they injected into Atlantic abolitionist movements, and the example they provided in American slave quarters when recounted long after the fact.

The rationale behind Taylor's definition of what a successful shipboard revolt entailed will and should inspire debate. So too will his suggestions concerning the possible continuing impact of shipboard rebellion within American slave communities (especially given slave owners' apparent adeptness at containing the explosion of outright revolt). The impact of shipboard rebellion on the business of slaving and on the ultimate success of Atlantic movements for abolition is a compelling point. Another point is abundantly clear throughout If We Must Die: At the heart of Atlantic slavery, the relationship between captive and captor was in many regards a war, and the slave ship was a critical and early site where that war was waged.