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Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora [1] is a book by Stephanie E. Smallwood and the 2008 winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. [2] [3] The book attempts to tell the story of enslaved Africans through the accounts of the Royal Africa Company (RAC) from 1675 to 1725.
Smallwood demonstrates that Europeans altered and exploited the economy and political structure of West Africa. The market economy created by demand for slaves created an environment in the West African littoral that, for those marked for forced labor, became an inexorable march towards the slaving ships. European market demands created expansionist policies in the emerging states of West Africa. By supplying these states with guns and access to wealth, Europeans allowed certain groups to establish and maintain hegemony over other groups. These continued conflicts provided captives who were sold to European slave traders, which funded further wars and captures.
One of the most important threads running through Smallwood's book is the process of commodification. This project begins in the introduction, where she contrasts the African slave experience with other migrant experiences: "In place of the networks that link origins and departures, and transform the emigrant into an immigrant, for African captives in the Atlantic system reverberated the traumatic echo of commodification" (18). While other immigrants are allowed to maintain links to their cultures, systems, and geographies, African slaves were deprived of all these. The commodification became complete when slaves were subjected to deprivations that tested the limits of human endurance—all in the name of maximizing profit for the RAC.
Using the slave traders' ledgers, Smallwood shows how the great human drama of the slave trade was reduced to notes and "quantitative 'facts.'" These accounting instruments, packaged as they are in the form to be transmitted to headquarters in London, both conceal and reveal the underlying stories. In order to keep alive the fiction that slaving is no more messy than other forms of commodity-trading, bookkeepers needed the instruments of ledgers and quantities, and they needed to believe in the fungibility of human life. "People, tobacco, gold, and gunpowder, all mutually exchangeable against one another, were able to pass smoothly across transactional lines that separated one account from another" (84).
Another of the projects at play in Saltwater Slavery is a troubling of the very notion of the "middle passage". Smallwood closes the book with an account from a slave named Sibell, noting:
"Sibell's remembered experience cannot fit into the neat temporal and spatial categories that frame my narration of the 'middle passage,' with its orderly narrative progression from African captivity through Atlantic commodification to American slavery...Sibell's narrative suggests that the slave ship charted no course of narrative continuity between the African past and American present, but rather memorialized an indeterminate passage marked by the impossibility of full narrative closure" (164).
To the African on a slave ship, there was nothing about the ordeal on a slave ship that implied linear progression to a known end. Rather, every moment was a rupture—a complete disintegration of previously understood experience. She calls the slaves' time on the ship an "experience of motion without discernible direction or destination" (122). Slaves had little idea where they were being taken or what was to be required of them when they arrived. Thus, to talk about the Atlantic slave ship experience as the "middle passage" does not correspond to the lived experiences of slaves themselves.
Smallwood reveals the stop-and-start nature of early diasporic attempts by African slaves. In the process of being removed to the Americas, slaves were deprived of the kin relations through which many African societies established the identities of their component members. Without connection to their kin structures or their ancestors' homelands, these Africans were unable to create a continuity of their lives with those of their ancestors. In addition, these Africans, especially the early slaves that Smallwood speaks of in the period 1675–1725, were unable to raise children of their own in the New World. She writes, "Their only heirs were those who trailed after them on the returning slave ships, to take the place of dead and departed saltwater laborers…" (160). Deprived of the ability to put down roots in the New World, these slaves were doubly robbed of identity: that of the one they left behind and that of the one they could not create in the Americas. Not until the 1720s were slaves able to raise American-born children and establish a surviving, sustainable community.
Smallwood's text engages with the most fundamental difficulty for any person who attempts to write the history of the Atlantic slave trade: very few accounts of the slaves themselves are extant. Instead, we must use the accounts of Europeans in order to attempt to reconstruct the lived experiences of African slaves. Using the body of data (both numerical and anecdotal) that European slave traders left behind, Smallwood rescues some of the static "stages" used to describe the Atlantic slave trade—the African Gold Coast, the middle passage, and the American slave market—by bringing to life the forces that defined these arenas.
The slave narrative is a type of literary genre involving the (written) autobiographical accounts of enslaved Africans, particularly in the Americas. Over six thousand such narratives are estimated to exist; about 150 narratives were published as separate books or pamphlets. In the United States during the Great Depression (1930s), more than 2,300 additional oral histories on life during slavery were collected by writers sponsored and published by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program. Most of the 26 audio-recorded interviews are held by the Library of Congress.
The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of various enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa that had been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids; Europeans gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade. The colonial South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were particularly dependent on labour for the production of sugarcane and other commodities. This was viewed as crucial by those Western European states which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with one another to create overseas empires.
The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807 is a United States federal law that provided that no new slaves were permitted to be imported into the United States. It took effect on January 1, 1808, the earliest date permitted by the United States Constitution.
The Middle Passage was the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas as part of the triangular slave trade. Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods, which were then traded for slaves with rulers of African states and other African slave traders. Slave ships transported the slaves across the Atlantic. The proceeds from selling slaves was then used to buy products such as hides, tobacco, sugar, rum, and raw materials, which would be transported back to northern Europe to complete the triangle.
Triangular trade or triangle trade is trade between three ports or regions. Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has export commodities that are not required in the region from which its major imports come. It thus provides a method for rectifying trade imbalances between the above regions.
Thomas Clarkson was an English abolitionist, and a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire. He helped found The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and helped achieve passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807, which ended British trade in slaves.
Olaudah Equiano, known for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa, was a writer and abolitionist from, according to his memoir, the Eboe (Igbo) region of the Kingdom of Benin. Enslaved as a child in Africa, he was taken to the Caribbean and sold as a slave to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more but purchased his freedom in 1766.
The Slave Coast is a historical name formerly used for that part of coastal West Africa along the Bight of Benin that is located between the Volta River and the Lagos Lagoon. The name is derived from the region's history as a major source of African people sold into slavery during the Atlantic slave trade from the early 16th century to the late 19th century.
Slavery in the British and French Caribbean refers to slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by France or the British Empire.
Slave ships were large cargo ships specially built or converted from the 17th to the 19th century for transporting slaves. Such ships were also known as "Guineamen" because the trade involved human trafficking to and from the Guinea coast in West Africa.
La Amistad was a 19th-century two-masted schooner, owned by a Spaniard colonizing Cuba. It became renowned in July 1839 for a slave revolt by Mende captives, who had been captured and sold to European slave traders and illegally transported by a Portuguese ship from West Africa to Cuba in violation of existing European treaties against the Atlantic slave trade. Two Spanish plantation owners, Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes, bought 53 captives, including four children, in Havana, Cuba, and were transporting them on the ship to their plantations near Puerto Príncipe. The revolt began after the schooner's cook jokingly told the slaves that they were to be "killed, salted, and cooked." Sengbe Pieh, a Mende man, also known as Joseph Cinqué, unshackled himself and the others on the third day and started the revolt. They took control of the ship, killing the captain and the cook. In the melee, three Africans were also killed.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, first published in 1789 in London, is the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano. The narrative is argued to represent a variety of styles, such as a slavery narrative, travel narrative, and spiritual narrative. The book describes Equiano's time spent in enslavement, and documents his attempts at becoming an independent man through his study of the Bible, and his eventual success in gaining his own freedom and in business thereafter.
Alexander Falconbridge was a British surgeon who took part in four voyages in slave ships between 1782 and 1787. In time he became an abolitionist and in 1788 published An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa. In 1791 he was sent by the Anti-Slavery Society to Granville Town, Sierra Leone, a community of freed slaves, where he died a year later in 1792.
The history of slavery spans many cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. Likewise, its victims have come from many different ethnicities and religious groups. The social, economic, and legal positions of enslaved people have differed vastly in different systems of slavery in different times and places.
Slavery has historically been widespread in Africa. Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa in ancient times, as they were in much of the rest of the ancient world. When the trans-Saharan slave trade, Indian Ocean slave trade and Atlantic slave trade began, many of the pre-existing local African slave systems began supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa. Slavery in contemporary Africa is still practised despite it being illegal.
The Barbary slave trade refers to slave markets on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, which included the Ottoman states of Algeria, Tunisia and Tripolitania and the independent sultanate of Morocco, between the 16th and 19th century. The Ottoman states in North Africa were nominally under Ottoman suzerainty, but in reality they were quasi-independent.
Seasoning, or The Seasoning, was the period of adjustment that slave traders and slaveholders subjected African slaves to following their arrival in the Americas. While modern scholarship has occasionally applied this term to the brief period of acclimatization undergone by European immigrants to the Americas, it most frequently and formally referred to the process undergone by enslaved people. Slave traders used "seasoning" in this colonial context to refer to the process of adjusting the enslaved Africans to the new climate, diet, geography, and ecology of the Americas. The term applied to both the physical acclimatization of the enslaved person to the environment and that person's adjustment to a new social environment, labor regimen, and language. Slave traders and owners believed that, if a person survived this critical period of environmental seasoning, they were less likely to die and the psychological element would make them more easily controlled. This process took place immediately after the arrival of enslaved people during which their mortality rates were particularly high. These "new" or "saltwater" slaves were called "outlandish" on arrival. Those who survived this process became "seasoned", and typically commanded a higher price in the market. For example, in eighteenth century Brazil, the price differential between "new" and "seasoned" slaves was about fifteen percent.
The Slave Route Project is a UNESCO initiative that was officially launched in 1994 in Ouidah, Benin. It is rooted in the mandate of the organization, which believes that ignorance or concealment of major historical events constitutes an obstacle to mutual understanding, reconciliation and cooperation among peoples. The project breaks the silence surrounding the slave trade and slavery that has affected all continents and caused great upheavals that have shaped our modern societies. In studying the causes, the modalities and the consequences of slavery and the slave trade, the project seeks to enhance the understanding of diverse histories and heritages stemming from this global tragedy.
A scramble was a particular form of slave auction that took place during the Atlantic slave trade in the European colonies of the West Indies and the United States. It was called a "scramble" because buyers would run around in an open space all at once to gather as many bondspeople as possible. Another name for a scramble auction is "Grab and go" slave auctions. Slave ship captains would go to great lengths to prepare their captives and set prices for these auctions to make sure they would receive the highest amount of profits possible because it usually did not involve earlier negotiations or bidding.
Panyarring was the practice of seizing and holding persons until the repayment of debt or resolution of a dispute which became a common activity along the Atlantic coast of Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries. The practice developed from pawnship, a common practice in West Africa where members of a family borrowing money would be pledged as collateral to the family providing credit until the repayment of the debt. Panyarring though is different from this practice as it involves the forced seizure of persons when a debt was not repaid.