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Review
'A shockingly vivid work . . . from a gifted chronicler of history's lower decks, at home in the unruly Atlantic world of pirates, slavers, sailors, runaways and rebels'
(Boyd Tonkin, Independent )'Enlightening and moving . . . Rediker comes closer than anyone so far to recreating the horrifying social reality of the Atlantic slave ship . . . If anyone doubts the reality of that human story, they only need to read Rediker's book'
(James Walvin, BBC History Magazine )'Meticulously researched . . . a terrible tale told here with great skill, clarity and compassion' Siobhan Murphy, Metro
(Siobhan Murphy, Metro )'The slave ship is a powerful focus for a profound drama'
(Iain Finlayson, The Times )'A brilliantly organised and compelling study of the Atlantic slave trade . . . A truly magnificent book'
(Sunday Telegraph )'The Slave Ship provides eloquent testimony to the high human drama of Atlantic 'trafficking'; the greed of the few and the manifold misery of the many that was endured in the trivial cause of sweetness'
(Ian Thomson, Spectator )'Rediker has made magnificent use of archival data; his probing, compassionate eye turns up numerous finds that other people who've written on the subject, myself included, have missed'
(Adam Hochschild, International Herald Tribune )'Rediker has produced a gripping study of one aspect of a great evil'
(Sunday Herald )'Gripping drama of human suffering'
(Lucy Sholes, Observer )'Brilliant study'
(Socialist Review )'The Slave Ship is dramatic, moving and kaleidoscopic'
(London Review of Books )'In this compelling books Marcus Rediker extends his widely known and highly respected mastery of the social history of the Anglo-American North Atlantic to the slave ship ... the book is intricately conceptualized and written beautifully'
(International Journal of Maritime History )Product Description
The slave ship was the instrument of history's greatest forced migration and a key to the origins and growth of global capitalism, yet much of its history remains unknown. Marcus Rediker uncovers the extraordinary human drama that played out on this world-changing vessel. Drawing on thirty years of maritime research, he demonstrates the truth of W.E.B DuBois's observation: the slave trade was the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history.
The Slave Ship focuses on the so-called golden age of the slave trade, the period of 1700-1808, when more than six million people were transported out of Africa, most of them on British and American ships, across the Atlantic, to slave on New World plantations. Marcus Rediker tells poignant tales of life, death and terror as he captures the shipboard drama of brutal discipline and fierce resistance. He reconstructs the lives of individuals, such as John Newton, James Field Stanfield and Olaudah Equiano, and the collective experience of captains, sailors and slaves.
Mindful of the haunting legacies of race, class and slavery, Marcus Rediker offers a vivid and unforgettable portrait of the ghost ship of our modern consciousness.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Marcus Rediker's examination of the engine of the slave trade is in fact a very human story. He starts from the ship itself but does not neglect the variety of coasts and communities from which the human traffic of the slave trade was dragged away.
The trade was horrific, especially in the detail. Here Rediker's documentary approach to the black diaspora has a written moral equivalency with Lanzman's film investigation of the Shoah.
The big names of the fight against the trade do not always stand up to close examination: he suggests that Newton behaved in truly brutal fashion before his conversion to the abolitionist cause. Clarkson comes out better. He literally risked his life on the waterfront of Bristol and Liverpool to gain interviews with the seamen who could give the essential evidence from inside the story of the trade.
The investigation looks at all levels of the shipboard hierarchy. The African slaves themselves are rightly central to this "bottom up" history and Rediker shows that they were of all ages, classes, backgrounds and peoples. An interesting section considers their variety of languages and the extent to which they were able to communicate with each other.
The new reader may be surprised at the level of resistance which was played out on the ships, with suicide the final possibility for freedom.
In line with his Marxist approach to history, we see that the crews of the these ships suffered alongside the slaves, even while they were obliged to chain, beat and humiliate them. Many of the miserable sailors were tricked into taking ship to the coasts of West Africa and many died there, on the Middle Passage or were abandoned in the ports of the West Indies or the American south. The slave ship captains down sized their crews for the voyage home by rejecting the least capable hands. In a moving coda Rediker tells us that the only ones to help these diseased and impoverished Europeans on the wharves of the New World were the Africans who they had taken there in chains.
Like the abolitionist Clarkson before him Rediker realises that the activist historian has to be doubly convincing to counteract the dismissive whitewashing of apologists, whether they are plantation owners or new right historians. This book has been overwhelmingly well reviewed in the press and the reader, expert or initiate, will learn much and come away wiser and more humane.
The trade was horrific, especially in the detail. Here Rediker's documentary approach to the black diaspora has a written moral equivalency with Lanzman's film investigation of the Shoah.
The big names of the fight against the trade do not always stand up to close examination: he suggests that Newton behaved in truly brutal fashion before his conversion to the abolitionist cause. Clarkson comes out better. He literally risked his life on the waterfront of Bristol and Liverpool to gain interviews with the seamen who could give the essential evidence from inside the story of the trade.
The investigation looks at all levels of the shipboard hierarchy. The African slaves themselves are rightly central to this "bottom up" history and Rediker shows that they were of all ages, classes, backgrounds and peoples. An interesting section considers their variety of languages and the extent to which they were able to communicate with each other.
The new reader may be surprised at the level of resistance which was played out on the ships, with suicide the final possibility for freedom.
In line with his Marxist approach to history, we see that the crews of the these ships suffered alongside the slaves, even while they were obliged to chain, beat and humiliate them. Many of the miserable sailors were tricked into taking ship to the coasts of West Africa and many died there, on the Middle Passage or were abandoned in the ports of the West Indies or the American south. The slave ship captains down sized their crews for the voyage home by rejecting the least capable hands. In a moving coda Rediker tells us that the only ones to help these diseased and impoverished Europeans on the wharves of the New World were the Africans who they had taken there in chains.
Like the abolitionist Clarkson before him Rediker realises that the activist historian has to be doubly convincing to counteract the dismissive whitewashing of apologists, whether they are plantation owners or new right historians. This book has been overwhelmingly well reviewed in the press and the reader, expert or initiate, will learn much and come away wiser and more humane.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Slave Ship itself is the focus of Marcus Redikers well written and thoughtful book on the British and American slave trade of the 18th Century: the ships themselves, the people who owned them, their captains, officers and ordinary sailors aswell as the enslaved Africans. The picture that the book paints is detailed and vivid covering everything from the construction of the Slave ships, to their manning, the voyage out from Britain loaded with trade goods, the time spent off Africa buying up slaves and the middle passage to the West Indies and mainland America.
Rediker captures the experiences of all those involved from a variety of sources (ships logs, autobiography, the anti-slavery societies, testomony to parliament). The experiences of the enslaved Africans whose journey often started deep within the continent, to capture and sale by their fellow Africans, collaborators in the noxious trade. Their experience on the ships, the brutality of the disciplinary regime and frequent resistance to enslavement are illuminated in countless examples that Rediker generalises into persistant themes. The ordinary sailors lot is put across well, from how they were recruited, their treatment at the hands of the ships captain and his officers, the effect the various stages of the trade had on them, and the risks they faced. Once the cargo of slaves was eventually sold in the Americas and the ships loaded with commodities for the final leg of the journey back to Britain a proportion of the crew seem to have been regarded as surplus, the high manning levels that were required for a cargo of slaves were no longer necessary. They frequently seem to have been left in the Americas, no longer needed and very seldom paid: an earlier ages flexible labour market.
An interesting and readable book that writes of the slave trade from a different perspective, there are no tables of slaves shipped, imports or exports - many other books already cover that important angle of the trade - only the human experience of the countless people who participated in the slave trade and those who were themselves the commodities of that trade. Rediker describes this experience in general terms, but it is the anecdotal accounts that give the general experience a vivid presence.
Rediker captures the experiences of all those involved from a variety of sources (ships logs, autobiography, the anti-slavery societies, testomony to parliament). The experiences of the enslaved Africans whose journey often started deep within the continent, to capture and sale by their fellow Africans, collaborators in the noxious trade. Their experience on the ships, the brutality of the disciplinary regime and frequent resistance to enslavement are illuminated in countless examples that Rediker generalises into persistant themes. The ordinary sailors lot is put across well, from how they were recruited, their treatment at the hands of the ships captain and his officers, the effect the various stages of the trade had on them, and the risks they faced. Once the cargo of slaves was eventually sold in the Americas and the ships loaded with commodities for the final leg of the journey back to Britain a proportion of the crew seem to have been regarded as surplus, the high manning levels that were required for a cargo of slaves were no longer necessary. They frequently seem to have been left in the Americas, no longer needed and very seldom paid: an earlier ages flexible labour market.
An interesting and readable book that writes of the slave trade from a different perspective, there are no tables of slaves shipped, imports or exports - many other books already cover that important angle of the trade - only the human experience of the countless people who participated in the slave trade and those who were themselves the commodities of that trade. Rediker describes this experience in general terms, but it is the anecdotal accounts that give the general experience a vivid presence.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A painful but necessary book
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,... Read more
Published 3 days ago by Garybaldbee
Fascinating and Moving
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. Read more
Published 20 days ago by ariadne
Essentia research tool
This is nothing short of an essential research tool for historians into earlier phases of the horrific transatlantic slave trade. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Mr. M. Haymes
Life On-board A Guineaman
An interesting and informative book from the perspective of those who commissioned, ran, worked and who were imprisoned on-board a slave ship or guineaman. Read more
Published 4 months ago by A. McGrath
A very clearly laid out book...
This is a non fiction book, about the slave trade, and specifically the slave ships which took the slaves from Africa to America and Britain in the 18th century. Read more
Published 19 months ago by miss_spookiness
A different new view of Slavery.
Many of the recent publications on slavery have lacked a certain analytical rigour and this book is no exception. Read more
Published on 20 Oct 2009 by J. Davies
Excellent read
Rediker's perspective - seeing the slave ship as a machine or technology of imprisonment - is an interesting view that's not received as much coverage as other aspects of the... Read more
Published on 20 Oct 2009 by Cheekablue
Fine account of a murderous business
Marcus Rediker, of Pittsburgh University's History Department, has written a brilliant account of the machine that enabled history's largest forced migration. Read more
Published on 30 April 2008 by William Podmore
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