Saltwater Slavery

Smallwood aims to move away from the numbers game that has ensnared so many other historians studying the Middle Passage. Instead of ledgers and account books, she uses letters, journals, and narratives from around the trade route to get closer to the slave experience itself. As the narrative follows the progress of the newly enslaved across the Middle Passage, Smallwood's use of quotes brings to life the everyday horror experienced by Saltwater Slaves, as Africans first arriving in the Americas were described at the time. -- Kathryn V. Stewart Library Journal 20070115 In this stark depiction of slaves and their 'utter alienation from the most basic norms of everyday life,' Smallwood simultaneously delivers a lucid popular history and expands scholarly understanding of slavery with a thorough, clear-eyed look at the dreaded Middle Passage and how it shaped the slave experience...Smallwood is particularly adept at portraying, in detail, the unbearable conditions of the slave ships...Extensive research, much of it from primary sources, forms Smallwood's basis, but she has a storyteller's knack for well-pitched anecdotes and pointed examples. Publishers Weekly 20070219 This deeply researched, tightly focused, and skillfully evocative look at the Atlantic slave trade, 1675-1725, details the experience of crossing the ocean--an ordeal fatal to many of the slaves who were forced to undertake it. The Atlantic 20070401 Stephanie E. Smallwood's excellent book Saltwater Slavery has attracted less attention than it deserves. Making careful use of the primary sources at [the National Archives at] Kew, Smallwood follows 300,000 captives taken from what is now Ghana between 1675 and 1725, to widening circles of the diaspora in the Americas. ...An ambitious, innovative and highly successful feature of her book is to take what is known about the beliefs of the isolated societies from which slaves were taken--communities who in some cases had never seen white people, the ocean or a ship--to offer a carefully controlled imaginative reconstruction of how the embarked slaves may have conceptualized the saltwater experience and attempted to reconcile what they saw with their existing world view. -- William St. Clair Times Literary Supplement 20080314