Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage by Sowande' M. Mustakeem (review)

This innovative book broadens the emergent scholarship on the slave trade by emphasizing the experiences of women and children who endured the forced Atlantic crossings alongside adult African men. Inspired by the works of Stephanie Smallwood, Saidiya Hartman, and Marcus Rediker, this book situates the slave vessel at the center of the process of commodification of humans, or as the author defines it, the "making and unmaking of black bodies" (p. 7). Thus, this work provides new interpretations about the intersection of violence and capitalism in the history of the slave trade.

The structure of this book follows others that often begin in Africa, continue with sections about African experiences in slave ships, and finish with the sale of captives in the Americas. The first chapter examines the process of enslavement in Africa, where the interaction of white merchants and African elites led to the "production of terrorizing environments" (p. 34). There, the white quest for financial gains as well the transformation of these profits into political power by African elites fractured African social and normative ways of reverence for human life. Chapter two, which focuses on how white merchants and captains marketed black bodies, examines white imaginings of slaves as commodities rather than the African experiences of starvation, cruelty, and death in slave vessels, all of which the author analyzes later in the third chapter. Entitled "Blood Memories," chapter four portrays slave ships not only as floating prisons but also as "mobile battlefields," as it provides details about slave resistance and particularly the role of captive women in these insurrections (p. 77). Chapter five moves to one the most extreme forms of resistance, suicide in slave vessels, through the examination of familial separation of captives and the gendering of psychological instability. The following chapter enriches our understanding of Africans experiencing diseases in these ships. Often deemphasized by other studies, an examination of the violent environment surrounding the sale of captives in the Americas after disembarkation forms the final chapter of the book. This concluding chapter focuses on less-studied populations like children and aged captives, who could become "refuse slaves" in the brutal market of human flesh.

This excellent work illustrates the paradoxical significance of U.S. slavery studies in relation to the larger African Diaspora. Even though the importance of slavery studies in the United States has encouraged scholarship on this subject in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, normative U.S. understandings of the African experiences in the Atlantic world sometimes mischaracterize these historical processes. For instance, the use of the term "Middle Passage" in this book, to encapsulate the experiences of captives in all slave vessels, exemplifies these Anglo-American normative views. As readily available research shows, more enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil than in the British Caribbean and the United States combined, and the same is true for the Spanish Americas, where more captives arrived than in the British colonies. Neither the Atlantic crossing of captives to Brazil or to the Spanish Americas fit the term "Middle Passage" based on the triangular trade, given that most of the slave voyages arriving in Brazil were bi-modal (departing from Brazil to Africa and then back to Brazil). And for the slave voyages arriving in the Spanish colonies, most of them involved some intercolonial and transimperial routes (e.g., from British Jamaica to Spanish Veracruz) in combination with forced treks across Mexico and South America. Even Cuba was part of these complicated slave trade networks before the emergence of the nineteenth-century Cuban-based traffic.

This may be seen as a critique about the scope rather than the interpretation of this book, as the analysis of this work pushes new, exciting boundaries for scholars examining the slave trade outside of the United States and the British Caribbean. To be fair, the author acknowledges her lack of engagement with the history...