The Slave Ship: A Human History (review)

In this eloquent and deeply provocative new book, Marcus Rediker synthesizes a vast body of recent scholarship as well as a broad range of testimonials, diaries, manifests, and other primary source material. His goal is to reconstruct the social world of the Anglo-American slave ship during what he calls "the long eighteenth century." While numerous other studies have explored the four-hundred-year trauma that was the Middle Passage from a wide variety of different perspectives, very few have focused on the ship itself as a brutally efficient piece of technology and site of struggle. For Rediker, this "strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory" was a key vehicle in the rise of modern capitalism and global processes of labor expropriation and exploitation (p. 9). But his primary interest is to explore the different "dramas" that played out on its decks-the complex and tremendously violent interactions between captains, sailors, and the enslaved at all stages of their collective journey. Violence and "terror" are the central themes that draw together and forever change these historical actors. The constant stream of gruesome details and chilling vignettes provided by Rediker are intended to subvert the tendency to retreat into scholarly number crunching and abstract analysis. And they make this book a bold and visceral, if somewhat disjointed, experiment in historical writing.

Between 1700 and the formal abolition of the trade in 1808, argues Rediker, most of the basic structural elements and social dynamics of the slaving voyage remained virtually unchanged. He includes very little discussion of how the trade itself came into being and developed over time, or why it came to such an abrupt end when it did. But, to be fair, these topics have been addressed at great length by other historians, and would have overburdened the tight focus of his narrative. Early chapters examine the physical features and construction of the slave ship and introduce the cast of characters through a series of portraits of individual captains, sailors, and slaves. Former slave Olaudah Equiano, repentant ship captain John Newton, and the less-well-known sailor and actor James Field Stanfield are each interrogated in depth for their first-hand accounts of the trade. Separate chapters at the end of the book move beyond these case studies to a more general view. Rediker brilliantly dissects the "personal, violent, and arbitrary" power of the captain (p. 204). He explores in fascinating detail the contradictory experience of ordinary sailors, who were viciously exploited as well as being exploiters themselves. He also argues convincingly that slaves developed meaningful communities and a "language of resistance" during their long passage, which included ship-wide communication networks, songs, hunger strikes, suicide, and armed revolts (p. 285).

Ultimately, observes Rediker, "the dramas that played out on the decks of a slave ship were made possible, one might even say structured, by the capital and power of people far from the ship" (p. 352). Yet merchants in Africa, Europe, and the Americas play a conspicuously peripheral role in the action, and aside from a careful analysis of the abolitionist campaign built around the famous image of the slave ship Brooks, there is not much engagement with imperial politics. This is a common problem when attempting to balance individual anecdotes meant for a popular readership with more rigorous scholarly analysis. Further studies are needed to sketch in the broader economic and political context for this catalog of horrors. Still, the book itself makes an important political statement. It is not just one more monographic addition to the constantly growing literature on slavery-it is an impassioned plea for a paradigm shift in the way we remember the trade, its many victims, and the horrific modern "machines" that made it all possible. And, as such, it will be of enduring value for students and specialists alike.