The Slave Ship: A Human History | Marcus Rediker | Moving account of a vile trade

The Slave Ship: A Human History | Marcus Rediker | Title should read: "The Slave Ship - An Inhumane History"

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The Slave Ship: A ...

	The Slave Ship: A Human History Marcus Rediker Viking Adult, 2007 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The missing link in the chain of American slavery

For three centuries slave ships carted millions of people from the coasts of Africa across the Atlantic to the Americas. Much is known of the slave trade and the American plantation system, but little of the ships that made it all possible. In The Slave Ship, award-winning historian Marcus Rediker draws on thirty years of research in maritime archives to create an unprecedented history of these vessels and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. He reconstructs in chilling detail the lives, deaths, and terrors of captains, sailors, and the enslaved aboard a ?floating dungeon? trailed by sharks. From the young African kidnapped from his village and sold into slavery by a neighboring tribe to the would-be priest who takes a job as a sailor on a slave ship only to be horrified at the evil he sees to the captain who relishes having ?a hell of my own,? Rediker illuminates the lives of people who were thought to have left no trace.
This is a tale of tragedy and terror, but also an epic of resilience, survival, and the creation of something entirely new. Marcus Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern economy was made.

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Moving account of a vile trade

Marcus Rediker, of Pittsburgh University's History Department, has written a brilliant account of the machine that enabled history's largest forced migration. Exploration, settlement, production and trade all required massive fleets of ships. The slave ships, with names like Liberty, Free Love and Delight, transported both the expropriated labourers and the new commodities that they produced. The ships were weapons, factories and prisons too.

These ships were the key to an entire phase of capitalist expansion. Between the late 15th century and the late 19th century, it is estimated that they transported 10.6 million people, of whom 1.5 million died in the first year of slavery. 1.8 million had died en route to Africa's coast, and 1.8 million died on the ships. So the trade killed more than five million people.

The 18th century was the worst century, in which seven million people were transported, three million of them in British and US ships, from Liverpool, Bristol and London. Seven million slaves were bought in Britain's sugar islands, for toil in the plantations.

For half the 18th century, Britain was at war with France or Spain, for markets and empire. The slaver merchant capitalists gained from it all. They hired the captains and the captains hired the sailors. The conflict between these two forces was the primary contradiction on board, until the ships reached the African coast, then all united against the slaves. The captains exercised the discipline of exemplary violence against slaves and sailors. Their cruelty and terror were not individual quirks but were built in to `the general cruelty of the system'.

Rediker studies the conflicts, cooperation and culture of the enslaved. He shows how the enslaved Africans were the primary, and first, abolitionists, supported by dissident sailors and antislavery activists like Thomas Clarkson.

The book renders the sheer horror of the experiences that this vile trade inflicted on people. Rediker concludes, "we must remember that such horrors have always been, and remain, central to the making of global capitalism." The British Empire, so romanticised by Brown, Blair and a horde of self-publicising sycophants, was built on this murderous trade.

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Title should read: "The Slave Ship - An Inhumane History"

It is hard to find a person not being aware of horrific slave trade years taking place between Africa and North America. And of course I had thought of having quite sufficient knowledge about this subject until I finished reading "The Slave Ship". I will not try to repeat what earlier reviewers posted. But I have to state again (like in many of my other reviews), that dark and unimaginable human nature presents itself in full spectrum, painted with details, sadness and vivid colors by the author. I disagree with the former reviewer: book is very well arranged and composed. And excuse my sarcasm: if you think that being a "wage slave" in some kind of corporation is a terrible fate...please consider sailors on board of the slave ship, where they were exploited and worked to death, their life not much different and valued than purchased and kept in chains slaves. Colonialism and slave trade: two dark attributes to wealth of many individuals and/in developed countries and capitalism in general. Picture of Henry Laurens (in the middle of the book)describes him: "..He used capital accumulated in the slave trade to rise to the highest levels of South Carolina society and politics. He became president of the Congress in 1777"; Saying this I have to stay objective. Slavery was not unknown to natives in Africa. Had they first managed to arrive in America with ships and guns, trade would be the same with only one difference: white and North American Indians would be locked below the decks and sailing to Africa. We are all the same. What an eye opening work Mr. Rediker !! It will be hard for me to forget your book.

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Slave ship

Very informative on the conditions on board the slave ships before and during the atlantic passage. Horrors for profit.

Must read

Unlike most historys, The Slave Ship is very readable, reads like a novel.
Makes you want to throw up, what the Europens did to these people. Sailors and slaves alike, everyone suffers.
Good read...

An expose of the first water

An excellent and quick reading book that provides a much needed "holistic" detailed examination of the slave trade from the African Traders/Sellers to the Western European Merchants/ Buyers and Sellers to the New World Buyers in America and the Caribbean. This exploitive and colorblind practice was (and still is) from beginning to end degrading to all parties (Merchants, Shipbuilders, Ship Captains, Sailors, African Traders/Kidnappers and Slaves) involved in it. It is a book that should be read in every high school.

African Americans, who are descended from those slaves, have much to be proud of in their endurance, spirit, strength (both physical and mental) and resourcefulness in surviving such horrific trauma.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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