THE SLAVE SHIP: A HUMAN HISTORY - MARCUS REDIKER

Oof. I suppose one doesn’t read a book called THE SLAVE SHIP and expect it not to be intense, but still, oof. Rediker also wrote that MANY-HEADED HYDRA book I read a while ago, which I found to be incredibly (and I say this as a very pro-pyrate person) pro-pyrate but also amazing and detailed. He clearly knows a lot about this time period (1500-1900) and location (the floating worlds atop the Atlantic and the landbased worlds they touch) so he’s the perfect person to take this subject on. Since the book focuses on what is, at heart, a business venture and thus drenched in logbooks and bureaucratese I worried about being overwhelmed with statistics and figures. In fact, the books most interesting parts focus on the Slave Trade’s role in creating the sorts of multinational corporations and ways of doing business we see everywhere today, where things like your bedsheets or phones are at the end of long, multi-continent processes, some parts of which seem evil. But Rediker sidesteps this problem with the books layout. We get chapters that mix maritime technology with history with zoology with political science with anthropology. We also get chapters that focus on single people (John Newton, Equiano) and traces their lives and shows us how living inside this vast machinery would have felt. I guess the most heartbreaking stuff is to see how even as the modern racial lines were being drawn the strong/rich in all racial categories (as a quick aside, the only aspect of the Atlantic Slave Trade we don’t spend any time with is the enslavement and shipping of Native Americans) were engaged in the most brutal sorces of exploitation. In Africa, there’s multiple accounts of the more coastal Fante, who at the time were  building empire and enslaving the inland Chamba (who the Europeans intially called the “Dunco” which was a term they learned from the Fante which actually meant “stupid person”), raising up on slave ships (the Europeans, predictibly, spend alot of time sharing gossip about which tribes and ethnic groups were most prone to insurrections on the the ships) only to end up focused on fighting the Chamba onboard. On the YT side (and this is the period where the idea of being YT and who is YT is first being created. Rediker points out that on many ships’ logs every crew member was listed as YT, despite some of them being Black Africans) Rediker points out how the economics of the triangle trade meant that you didn’t need a very large crew to go back from the New World to Europe. Since such ships only carried goods and didn’t have a prisoner that needed constant guarding, you could get by with about half of the crew. And remember, the people who didn’t make it back to England wouldn’t be paid. So captains were incentivized to leave sailors who were sick or weak leading to a situation where New World ports like Charleston and Kingston were full of “Wharfingers/Scrowbankers/Beach Honers” stranded poor sailors, often with brutal West African diseases or parasites. Otherwise, the stuff about how these ships were followed by shiver of sharks, anxious to eat the dead and living thrown overboard, which the captains exploited as a source of controlling terror, might have been the most chilling. There are terrible echoes of today towards the end of the book when British groups are seeking to outlaw the trade while others seek to make the process more humane. There were several laws passed about how many slaves could be on what size ships. There’s fascinating stuff about how African’s assumed the Europeans were cannibals and/or buying these people the sacrifice to their god while at the same time there are dozens of accounts about how these Africans are cannibals and how the slaves they (the Euorpeans) are buying are being saved from human sacrifice. A powerful metaphor, hard to tell if it’s euphemism or dysphemism. Anyway, I loved it, it fits in with my last few years interest and fascination with this time period. I’d like a book that more directly explores the link between this trade and the creation of capitalism, a topic that THE SLAVE SHIP touches on but I’d love to think more about. 2.5 billion ships.