The Slave Ship: A Human History » (Reprint)

Marcus Rediker, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, is author of the award-winning Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. He lives in Pittsburgh.

For more than three centuries, slave ships carried millions of people from the coasts of Africa to the New World. In The Slave Ship, award-winning historian Marcus Rediker creates an unprecedented history of these vessels and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, as a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern capitalism was made.

The New York Times - Adam Hochschild

…the notorious Middle Passage across the Atlantic, on which more than 12 million Africans were embarked for the Americas over more than three centuries, we know about almost entirely from the perpetrators. There are few accounts of this voyage by slaves…but an astonishingly large body of evidence remains from those who trafficked in human beings: letters, diaries, memoirs, captain's logbooks, shipping company records, testimony before British Parliamentary investigations, even poetry and at least one play by former slave-ship officers. It is this rich array of material that Marcus Rediker plumbs, more thoroughly than anyone else to date, for his masterly new book, The Slave Ship: A Human History…Rediker has made magnificent use of archival data; his probing, compassionate eye turns up numerous finds that other people who've written on this subject, myself included, have missed.

Introduction     1
Life, Death, and Terror in the Slave Trade     14
The Evolution of the Slave Ship     41
African Paths to the Middle Passage     73
Olaudah Equiano: Astonishment and Terror     108
James Field Stanfield and the Floating Dungeon     132
John Newton and the Peaceful Kingdom     157
The Captain's Own Hell     187
The Sailor's Vast Machine     222
From Captives to Shipmates     263
The Long Voyage of the Slave Ship Brooks     308
Epilogue: Endless Passage     343
Acknowledgments     357
Notes     361
Index     417
Illustration Sources and Credits     433