A Review of The Slave Ship, by Marcus Rediker

The Slave Ship: A Human History. By Marcus Rediker. New York: Penguin Books. 2008. 434 pp. $19.00.

If one had to select a single word to encapsulate the many facets of the Atlantic slave trade, perhaps the broadest option — if also a rather banal one — would be transmutation. With only a hint to the suffering of African captives, this term nevertheless captures the manifold changes which went into this gruesome and formative enterprise, from those of the ship itself to the slaves to the burgeoning international market system. And, one might add hopefully, to the consciousness of the reader; for Marcus Rediker’s clearest purpose in penning The Slave Ship is to animate its horrors for the detached and less informed through an illumination of these concurrent processes of transformation.

Through a meticulous examination of 17th and 18th century English slave trade documents, both statistical and anecdotal, Rediker formulates a compelling narrative which relies heavily upon subjugated perspectives, explores the relevance of class to the social and economic fabric of the trade, and emphatically affirms the humanity of the enslaved. In combination, these elements enable Rediker to tell a “history from below” with maximum color, flair, and solemnity (a delicate balance which he strikes quite well).

The chapters of the Slave Ship are largely organized by individual or group perspective, with each dominated by the account of a particular person or demographic. This grants the reader an intimate time with the seminal autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa. Equiano was an African-born abolitionist who documented his experiences in the Middle Passage, what Rediker calls “a pageant of cruelty, degradation, and death”.[1] His account shows in full what many of the others demonstrate partially with respect to the transmutation of Africans into slaves: their abduction by African traders, the forced march from the African interior to the West Coast, the “astonishment and terror” of seeing ocean and white people for the first time, and the tyranny of the cramped, virulent, and violence-ridden ship.[2] Rediker does well to structure his portrait of the slaves around Equiano’s writings (along with his chapter on insurrection and captives as shipmates) since it paints a vivid picture of the misery of the enslaved through an individual African lens.

Rediker surrounds this most important perspective — that of the slave — with substantial insight from captain and crew, both of which add vital context. Here as all throughout emerges his concise narrative style, particularly in describing the centrality of terror to the world of the slaver and the hierarchy of cruelty which ran from captain to crew to slave: “The captain used an entire technology of terror to control the crew”.[3] Crisp sentences like these abound in The Slave Ship, often as concluding analysis to long paragraphs of narration or scene-setting. This hierarchy remains relevant to his portrait of the sailors, too, in which he introduces class as a somewhat neglected aspect of slave trade historiography. Rediker focuses heavily on the sketchy recruitment tactics and chicanery of merchants and captains to lure drunken and indebted sailors onto slave ships, noting sympathetically that these men were “the refuse and dregs of the Nation”, most of whom did not like the slave trade.[4] Still, the slaver’s hierarchy outbid any bottom of the barrel-solidarity which Rediker might have hoped would congeal between seamen and slaves. Tormented themselves by ruthless captains, sailors “transformed the African captive into a commodity for sale…[and] took out their plight on the even more abject and powerless captives”.[5] Sailors were in these ways quite directly involved in the oppression of the slaves.

The array of perspectives and personal narrative style allow the author to convey the strongest message of his book, namely that the struggle of the enslaved was a human one. (He thus offers an implicit rebuttal to the notion of “social death” which holds that slaves lost their humanity completely on slavers.) Within the broad outline of “culture stripping from above and an oppositional process of culture creation from below”, Rediker is particularly good on dark euphemism, insurrection, and culture aboard the slave ship.[6] He by no means shies away from the culture stripping side, which included such degradations of African customs as “dancing” — coerced exercise, often with whips.[7]Rediker argues instead that in spite of their pain, the humanity of the slaves persisted through song, orations, and other forms of culture. Though culture exists wherever humanity lies, circumstances shape its character; thus, as captains tried to beat it out of them, culture became linked to the slaves’ “struggle for memory” which formed the bedrock of their opposition.[8] Out of this indisputably human desire for freedom grew insurrection, the life-affirming value of which Rediker extols, even when it took the form of collective suicide. His likening of an impending insurrection to a loaded gun and his use of the extended metaphor of explosion on this point is especially profound, given that slavers had mounted cannons pointed inwards to suppress any such uprising.

Through ample talk of contradictions and dialectics and his heavy focus on the sailors, Rediker certainly reveals his Marxist approach. Though a turn-off to some, it both fortifies a key voice of the ship and cogently explains the foundational role of the trade to international market capitalism’s ascendance. Others might criticize Rediker’s commitment to the individual’s account of horrifying torment, arguing that the sheer volume of these actually desensitizes and hampers his humanizing aim. While the narrative might at times risk growing monotonous, Rediker’s repetition has a crucial effect: it serves as insurance against the sensational. By offering as many shades of violent content as he can, Rediker ensures a more balanced and nuanced impression of “the captain’s own hell” for his reader.[9]

Though less tailored to the academic, aspiring or actualized, Rediker’s stark and often heartrending narrative will likely fill in emotional gaps (if not factual ones) for the trained historian. This book primarily targets the average person and seeks to chronicle the slave trade in its every iteration: from the construction of the ship to its becoming “slaved” to the voyage whereby Africans became racialized property, captains became devils, and a new global economic order was forged. Rediker thus furthers the aim of Thomas Clarkson in animating the slave trade and making it more palpable for the public, crucial work in a time when increasing historical distance threatens to render its memory stale while its lingering effects remain pervasive and potent.

Eddie Ryan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

[1] Marcus Rediker. The Slave Ship. p. 120

[2] Marcus Rediker. The Slave Ship. p. 108

[3] Ibid p. 205

[4] Ibid p. 227

[5] Ibid p. 239

[6] Marcus Rediker. The Slave Ship. p. 265

[7] Ibid p. 19

[8] Ibid p. 284

[9] Marcus Rediker. The Slave Ship. p. 187