The Slave Ship

The reviews above cover the ground quite adequately, so let me just add this: The Slave Ship is a powerful piece of essential background for all who live in today's capitalist economies.As one reviewer elsewhere so poignantly put it (Alice Walker), this book is homework of the most insistent order. The very least that we, especially the descendents of the slave-dealing participants, must do for those who suffered this terrible criminality, is try to comprehend what happened and why. Reading this book brings to mind Primo Levi's insistent plea that we listen; we, the generations who now can view the whole sorry disgrace that was the slave trade with the comfort of hindsight, have an obligation and a need to do so.That said, it is both galling and deeply sad that there exist so precious few accounts from the slaves and participants themselves. This book tries to offer some redress, and succeeds.The one image which remains to haunt you from this masterful history book, is the one of the slaves singing. Often in chains, usually in the stink of the cramped below-decks, and most movingly at night, as they were wrenched ever further away from their homes in the fetid Hell that was the floating dungeon of their slave ship, the Africans would sing on the high seas, sometimes in a call and response around the hold, to give voice to their extreme misfortune. Did they know that there was no happy ending, that they were headed to a certain death through toil and hard labour on a different continent, all to keep the coiffured whitefolks in sugar and cotton?It must have been the Blues as we have never heard it and only God and the Ocean can.

In view of all the news coverage of BLM I decided to read this book. Very interesting but I found the final 2 chapters to be heavy going. Well worth reading though.

There was so much more to slavery than I'd realised, it lasted 400 years not 300, for one thing,and the journey from Africa to the Americas was a world on its own. Ghastly beyond belief, but for sailors too. They died in huge numbers, the captains were mostly sadistic and the sailors soon were too. The British Navy engaged two ex-slave ship sailors but had to sack them because they were "inhuman". Fascinating on the practical and psychological effects of slavery on everyone involved, including the slave ship owners in England or America.

This is nothing short of an essential research tool for historians into earlier phases of the horrific transatlantic slave trade.Goes where other books on this huge subject seldom go. Only got to p.45 as I am reading about 12 books at the same time!Max Haymes

Good to know how it happened...this tremendous cruelty!

Rediker's book is a pathfinding study, but not always symmetrical in the presentation of its subject. The introduction is excellent, but too many metaphors and examples spoils the flow.

Given the subject matter this is, inevitably, a painful book to read but it contains enough to reward those prepared to stomach the deeply depressing catalogue of brutality, inhumanity and greed which characterised the slave trade. Marcus Rediker provides an accessible and detailed account of the technical, social and cultural aspects of life on British and American slave ships in the 18th century, for the captains and officer class, the ordinary seamen and, of course, the enslaved themselves.Much of the book concentrates on the social order, hierarchies and class structures on board ship and Rediker isn't afraid to draw almost Marxian parallels between the slave trade and modern capitalist systems. He is also strong on the methods of control and, frankly, terrorism deployed by the crews to keep the slaves quiescent and, in turn, by the captain and officers to keep the crews disciplined (one of the surprises for me was the extent to which slave trading voyages were almost as brutish and hazardous for the seamen as they were for the slaves - more so in some cases since unlike the slaves the crew had no intrinsic market value which it was in the interests of captains and merchants to protect).Rediker also makes much of points of transformation, the moments when social and power relations changed, such as when the dispossesed seamen reached Africa and became defined in the social hierachy not by their ('inferior') class but by their ('superior') ethnicity, or when slaves were passed from the brutal but culturally familiar control of Africans to the bewildering high technology of a European slave ship (another surprise was the extent of complicity in the slave trade by some Africans themselves who effectively acted as middlemen, supplying the trade with all the human material it needed) .Rediker rarely moralises or condemns outright, although he is scathing of the hypocrisy of John Newton, the former slave captain turned preacher who wrote 'Amazing Grace'. Most of the time, however, he doesn't need to, the brutality and horror speaks foritself. The commodification of human life hardly requires commentary. But despite everything he does frequently offer hope for humanity through an emphasis on the culture of resistance, both passive and active, developed by the slaves and the new, if often short lived, communities they forged amongst themselves on board ship.There is much repetition of material - the book could probably be at least a third shorter with firmer editing - and the use of American spelling is an irritant, but it deserves to be read by anybody who wants to understand the roots of modern society, or who wants to see the extremes to which an amoral and unregulated pursuit of profit can lead.