From Africa to Jamaica: The Making of an Atlantic Slave Society, 1775-1807 (review)

From Africa to Jamaica examines the forced migration of Africans from three principal trading regions—the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast, and West Central Africa—to Jamaica in the closing three decades of the British transatlantic slave trade, 1775 to 1807. Diptee's task is twofold: first, she turns on its head the conventional conclusion that adult males, and, in more recent arguments, women and children, dominated the slave trade in its closing years. "Health and condition," Diptee stresses, were more paramount than sex or age in determining cargo (4). Second, she challenges both old and revised claims that Africans experienced "social death" through their experiences of enslavement. In an alternative explanation, Diptee posits that despite traders' and merchants' efforts to reduce them to mere chattel, Africans did not "lose their sense of self" (6). Instead, they drew upon their personal histories, experiences, and beliefs to interpret their fates, rebuild their lives, and establish new connections. From Africa to Jamaica is a bold and detailed exploration of the intricacies of African captives' lives as they traversed across the Atlantic to Jamaica.

Diptee's analysis begins by looking at the demographic composition of Africans boarding and disembarking slaving vessels. The first two chapters elucidate that while Caribbean planters preferred Africans of a particular age, sex, and ethnic group, they refused to invest in ailing, maimed, or otherwise disabled chattel, even if such a consignment otherwise suited their stated requirements. Jamaican planters' overriding concern was obtaining healthy, able-bodied workers who would live long enough and work hard enough to return capital outlay. To use Diptee's poignant words: "dead captives had no value and sickly captives had little value—regardless of their age and sex" (35). Planters' and merchants' interests aligned; slave traders aimed to reap the highest yields from their cargo, and therefore declined to accept any situation that infringed upon profit maximization. Investigating multiple factors that diminished captive Africans' health, and reviewing merchants' painstaking efforts to mitigate them, Diptee posits that ship captains aimed to rapidly depart the African coast because delayed departures increased the risks of illness, death, and onboard revolts. In practice, this meant that ships sailed once they were sufficiently packed with healthy cargo, even if the demography diverged from that demanded by planters. Planter requirements were sometimes satisfied, provided that African suppliers quickly acquired specified cargo. Supply was not dictated by the peculiarities of demand, but by the practical concerns of obtaining readily available and easily acquired stock. A second key argument Diptee makes, which is bound to spark considerable interest and debate among historians, is that Caribbean buyers strongly preferred young women and children—as much as, if not more, than they desired prime adult males—in the closing three decades of the eighteenth century. Higher taxes on adults above age twenty-five, greater innocence and trainability of young people, and greater fecundity among young women caused a decline in the prominence of prime adult males in the slave market.

Diptee's particular emphasis on children in the slave trade makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of children and slavery. Chapter three details the variety of ways in which children were acquired and sold; because their physical vulnerabilities made them easy prey for slave raiders, children comprised a sizable proportion of captives. Furthermore, as dependents children were in danger of being sold or pawned into slavery to facilitate debt cancellation, or simply to provide some form of income to their benefactors when they themselves faced misfortune. At other times, children were enslaved together with their families as punishment for crimes like witchcraft. Children, then, were far more significant to the slave trade than previously understood, and as Diptee demonstrates with painstaking details and statistical analysis, accounted for 14-20 percent of captives traded by the British between 1776 and 1808 (53).

Chapter four returns to a more common theme, that of the human cost of the...