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Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

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Stephanie Smallwood has written a book entitled "Saltwater Slavery" that aims, as she says, to provide a linear analysis of the commodification process that transformed Africans into slaves. Her focus is on enslavement in the Gold Coast and trans-Atlantic trade during the 17th and early 18th centuries.

The book is broken into three sections - Capture and enslavement in the Gold Coast, transformation from human to commodity, and the African Diaspora in America. The first section is necessarily short and merely sets the tone for Smallwood's argument - that the enslavement process was a matter of commodifying humans into marketable objects.

The second section, the commodification of these people into objects, is well researched and eminently readable. Smallwood is especially powerful when evoking images of the horrors that individuals underwent during the process.

The third section, the African Diaspora, is also short and to the point, but does not benefit Smallwood's argument as much as the first two sections do.

Overall, this is a good book, but has some minor flaws - first, the Diaspora section is (as previously mentioned) a little weak, and the fact that Smallwood focuses on the Trans-Atlantic Commerce between the Gold Coast and the British Caribbean leaves something to be desired, since both Virginia & South Carolina were important colonies that had slaves during this period, but are largely omitted from the work.

Saltwater Slavery is an award-winning study of how the Atlantic slave trade worked to transform human beings into commodities. Author Stephanie Smallwood takes the records of the Royal African Company and the correspondence between its employees and digs out their unintentional hints as to what enslaved Africans actually experienced during this process. It's not only a first rate piece of historical research, it's well written and compelling, which as a former graduate student I have to say is not always the case with academic books.

I won't try to recount here all the things I learned about the slave trade, but there was one piece that has really stuck with me. Smallwood explains what is known about the spiritual beliefs of people from the Gold Coast and extrapolates the struggles they must have had dealing with death away from their communities and especially at sea, where there is no earth in which to bury people and no kin to carry out the rituals necessary to transport them to the realm of the ancestors. "In essence, a fully realized death could not be accomplished alone. Nor was it something one could attain at sea." This understanding makes it all the more haunting when we read a captain's account of the steady death toll on his ship the James during one Atlantic crossing. Although I knew that at least 20 per cent of Africans died during the Middle Passage, Smallwood's analysis adds another level to that horror: "For the collective of African captives remaining aboard the James, the death of one of their number left them with the burden of a tormented soul, trapped here among them because its migration to join the ancestors had been thwarted." As if being ripped from your homeland and chained together in crowded, disease-ridden conditions without enough food wasn't horrible enough.

So why read something this depressing if you're not an academic in this field? There are lots of reasons, but for one, it's increased my wonder at the human spirit and people's ability to find new forms of meaning, even when every sense of self has been stripped from them. The book ends with "saltwater slaves" trying to establish new communities in the Americas. Smallwood writes here about the particular importance of women in bringing the types of knowledge and experience that help the new arrivals to eventually survive in a new land.

I wanted to like this book, but it was an incoherent mess. Smallwood wants to take the slave trade out of the realm of impersonal statistics and focus on its human impact, an an admirable goal. However she doesn't have enough in the way of personal narratives, particularly from the enslaved, to achieve that goal. Instead we go from impersonal statistics about slave exports from various African port cities to impersonal statistics about individual slave voyages.

There are glimmers of something better here, moments when she does find an interesting story to tell, but she's never able to weave these occasional anecdotes into an effective narrative.

The book is well-intentioned, but good intentions aren't reason enough to pick up a book like this. Whether you're a casual reader or serious researcher, there are better places to go to learn about the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

This book is an excellent resource for all educators. It will really make a History class shine with it's interesting details! Especially during Black History month and this book can be utilizing for the college professor that wants to add more indepth study into Afro American History.