Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage

Mustakeem, a professor of history and African and African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, investigates how slave ships functioned as social spaces in this detail-laden account of the 18th-century transatlantic slave trade. Countering the quantitative focus of recent slave voyage histories, she uses diaries, ships’ logs, legal testimonies, and other archival materials to map relationships among slaves, sailors, and shipboard doctors. The Middle Passage was not just a traumatic mass event, she demonstrates, but a complex “manufacturing process” by which slavers “unmade” human bodies into commodities. Tracing patterns of dehumanization, physical and psychological torture, and enforced dependency that captured Africans faced aboard ships, Mustakeem argues that the Middle Passage experience fundamentally shaped slavery as a global institution. Throughout, she works to make visible the shipboard presence of women, children, the elderly, the ill, and the disabled, revealing the effects of age, gender, health, and ability on slavery’s economic and social development. Mustakeem relies heavily on her primary sources, and at times she fails to analyze historical anecdotes sufficiently to support her broader claims. Still, this book will be of enormous utility to scholars, especially those eager for narrative insight into this largely opaque chapter of transatlantic history. (Nov.)