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Stephanie E. Smallwood. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. 273 pp. $29.95.
The paramount difficulty in studying the Atlantic slave trade is in trying to include the perspective of its victims, the Africans kidnapped from their homes brutalized during the "Middle Passage," and then dispersed in the Americas among a hostile and foreign people. The source material available is almost exclusively written or, in the case of physical artifacts, used by slave traders and middlemen rather than captives. To say the least, the slave trade traumatized its victims, but how, Stephanie Smallwood asks, did they understand this experience?
In her new book, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, Smallwood approaches this question by examining the journals, letters, and marginalia among the large archive of materials available from the Royal African Company between the years 1675 and 1725. The Royal African Company was the British organization that possessed a monopoly on the slave trade between Britain, Africa, and the British colonies in the Americas until 1698. Smallwood acknowledges larger, more comprehensive studies of the Adantic slave trade, but notes that these histories focus methodologically upon the extensive quantitative records collected by traders and reflect the slave traders' perspective. "Distinct from the public transcript that produced the winners' version of the story (how many units of merchandise sold, how many pounds sterling earned, how much profit, how much loss), the more hidden, internal transcript tells a fuller story - the human story of the Adantic slave trade" (5).
Indeed, Smallwood lucidly crafts several dramatic stories from this "hidden source," resisting the conclusions the writers clearly intended. One such story derives from the mortality table maintained by the captain...