The political considerations, specifically the dispute over Cuba with Spain, prevented the US government from recognizing its own shortcomings. The US demonstrated lip service toward eradicating slavery by equating it to piracy, but slave traders were rarely persecuted because of the multiple legal loops. After the collapse of the trade through Brazil, slave traders found their haven in New York, thus forming the Middle Passage: New York-Cuba-West Central Africa. Illegal transportation thrived and even grew in proportions thanks to the absence of adequate control measures. In The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage, John Harris presents a story that indicates the fierceness of the US opposition against an absolute ban on slavery.Įven though most countries prohibited the oversea slave trade at the beginning of the 18th century, the business didn't stop. 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.A definitive account of the last decades of the international slave trade. This is a tale of tragedy and terror, but also an epic of resilience, survival, and the creation of something entirely new, something that could only be called African American. From the young African kidnapped from his village and sold to the slavers by a neighboring tribe, to the would-be priest who takes a job as a sailor on a slave ship only to be horrified by 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. He reconstructs in chilling detail the lives, deaths, and terrors of captains, sailors, and the enslaved aboard a “floating dungeon” trailed by sharks.
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. Much is known of the slave trade and the American plantation complex, but little of the ships that made it all possible. For more than three centuries, slave ships carried millions of people from the coasts of Africa across the Atlantic to the New World.
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