Synopses & Reviews
On June 28, 1839, the Spanish slave schooner Amistad set sail from Havana on a routine delivery of human cargo. On a moonless night, after four days at sea, the captive Africans rose up, killed the captain, and seized control of the ship. They attempted to sail to a safe port, but were captured by the U.S. Navy and thrown into jail in Connecticut. Their legal battle for freedom eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where their cause was argued by former president John Quincy Adams. In a landmark ruling, they were freed and eventually returned to Africa. The rebellion became one of the best-known events in the history of American slavery, celebrated as a triumph of the legal system in films and books, all reflecting the elite perspective of the judges, politicians, and abolitionists involved in the case. In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the rebellion for its true proponents: the African rebels who risked death to stake a claim for freedom.and#160;Using newly discovered evidence, Rediker reframes the story to show how a small group of courageous men fought and won an epic battle against Spanish and American slaveholders and their governments. He reaches back to Africa to find the rebelsandrsquo; roots, narrates their cataclysmic transatlantic journey, and unfolds a prison story of great drama and emotion. Featuring vividly drawn portraits of the Africans, their captors, and their abolitionist allies, he shows how the rebels captured the popular imagination and helped to inspire and build a movement that was part of a grand global struggle between slavery and freedom. The actions aboard the Amistad that July night and in the days and months that followed were pivotal events in American and Atlantic history, but not for the reasons we have always thought.and#160;The successful Amistad rebellion changed the very nature of the struggle against slavery. As a handful of self-emancipated Africans steered their own course to freedom, they opened a way for millions to follow. This stunning book honors their achievement.and#160;
Review
The Slave Ship is truly a magnificent and disturbing bookdisturbing not only because it details the violence and barbarism of the free market in human beings, but it reminds us that all actors in this drama are human, including the ships crew.
The Slave Ship is not for the faint-hearted, but like the millions who took this voyage in the past, we have no choice. We have to come to terms with this history if we want to understand how this modern, racialized and globalized economy based on exploitation came to be.
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
The Slave Ship is a book, like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, that will change the way we see history and ourselves. In this brilliant work, Marcus Rediker achieves the impossible: he enables us to imagine centuries of unimaginable cruelty. He also enables us to imagine the resistance to slavery that eventually brought it down, through the evocation of unforgettable characters: Olaudah Equiano, a slave who recorded the ordeal of the Middle Passage in his autobiography; James Field Stanfield, the anti-slavery sailor and poet; John Newton, the slave ship captain turned abolitionist who wrote 'Amazing Grace.' Rediker writes with the care of a scholar, the eye of a poet, and the heart of a rebel. He does justice to the story of a monstrous injustice.
Martín Espada, author of The Republic of Poetry
This Atlantic epic brilliantly reveals the slave ship as a 'vast machine,' transforming its human cargo into slaves-and portrays precisely the variety of Africans, free and captive, in their choices and desperate struggles.
Patrick Manning, author of Slavery and African Life
The Atlantic's foremost historian from below has written a masterpiece. In this human history you can hear the shrieks of pain, the groans of loss, and uproar of rebellion. In the midst of mass and calculated murders Rediker finds the genesis of a human story that delineated ethnicities, that created musical lamentations, that caused heart-rending resistance, that produced African and human consciousness, and in the end, with ex-slaves offering amazing graces to discarded sailors, the cry still rises up from this magnificent book for justice and for reparation.
Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged
Marcus Rediker is one of the most distinguished historians of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and he brings to the slave ship both an unrivaled knowledge of maritime labor and transport and a deep theoretical perspective on the slave trade's role in the rise of capitalism. His is a human history with all its dramas and complex lineaments.
Steven Hahn, author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning A Nation Under Our Feet
Marcus Rediker, like the incomparable Herman Melville, understands both the immediate human drama and the sweeping global context of life aboard a cramped ocean vessel in the age of sail. Now Rediker brings his informed passion, energetic research, rich storytelling, and stark analysis to perhaps the most wrenching, important and neglected topic in the early modern Atlantic World. Following in the wake of such pioneers as W. E. B. DuBois and Elizabeth Donnan, Rediker joins a growing group of scholars who are reinvigorating historical research on the huge traffic in enslaved Africans. Two centuries after the abolition of the English and North American slave trade, he uses his unique gifts to take us below decks, giving a human face to the inhuman ordeal of the Middle Passage.
Peter Wood, author of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept
Mixing powerful vignettes with astute analysis, Markus Rediker brings the terrible dramas of the middle passage to life. This beautifully written and exhaustively researched book gives us unforgettable portraits of the captives, captains, and crewmen who came together in that particular kind of hell known as the slave ship. This is Atlantic history at its best.
Robert Harms, author of The Diligent
"The slave ship is an open metaphoric wound lying at the heart of attempts to understand the middle passage. Marcus Rediker's remarkable new book combines a uniquely profound understanding of the maritime industries in the eighteenth century with an imaginative humanism. No other book has displayed such combined practicality and compassion regarding the actual workings of 'the abominable traffick.' Redikers work important not only because of what it uncovers, but because it suggests ways of overcoming the disastrous legacy of the slave trade. The Slave Ship struck me with the force of prophecy, it is a superbly realized work that will actually change the living memory of slavery, and only Marcus Rediker could have written it."
Marcus Wood, author of Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography
The slave ship was a machine that manufactured modernity. As it moved across the Atlantic, the world changed. It joined Europe, Africa, and the Americas, creating enormous wealth and untold misery, and its hellish voyages continue to cast a shadow over our lives. Marcus Rediker, a preeminent historian the maritime Atlantic, unravels its history with unmatched knowledge of the material changes and moral ruptures its created. Slave Ship is the best of histories, deeply researched, brilliantly formulated, and morally informed.
Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland and author of Many Thousands Gone (Winner of the Bancroft Prize), Slaves Without Masters, and Generations of Captivity
I was hardly prepared for the profound emotional impact of The Slave Ship: A Human History. Reading it established a transformative and never to be severed bond with my African ancestors who were cargo in slave ships over a period of four centuries. Their courage, intelligence and self-respect; their fierce efforts to free themselves (and, though cruelly bound, to create community) moved me so deeply that, for several days, I took to my bed. There I pondered the madness of greed, the sadism of wielding absolute power over any creature in chains, the violence of attempting to dominate and possess what is innately free. For all Americans and indeed all those who live in the Western world who have profited by, or suffered from, the endless brutality of the slave trade, during all its centuries and into the present, this book is homework of the most insistent order. There is no re-balancing of our wrecked planet without sitting with, and absorbing, the horrifying reality of what was done, by whites, by the West, by the wealthy, to our beloved ancestors, The Africans, who endured and sometimes survived the middle passage to bring their radiance and their indomitable spirits into the New World. What, now, is to be done? That is the question that can only have a collective answer.
Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple
The Slave Ship is a tour de force. Never before has the reality of the trade been so comprehensively and subtly conveyed. Marcus Rediker's intimate knowledge of sea-faring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries enables him to reconstruct the life - and death on those on the slave trading vessels more vividly and convincingly than any previous historian. I am sure that it will continue to be read as long as people want to understand crucial episode in the birth of the modern world.
Robin Blackburn, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research, New York, and author of The Making of New World Slavery
I admire this book more than I can easily say. At the heart of it is the slave ship, engine of wood and hemp and canvas, instrument of terror. From this dark heart Marcus Rediker ranges outwards over four centuries and three continents. He brings to his task a combination of dedicated research, deep human concern and narrative power of a high order. By insisting on the realities of individual experience, he counteracts our human tendency to take refuge from horror in comforting abstractions. We are all indebted to him for this. In range and scope and in the humanity of its treatment, this account of the Atlantic slave trade is unlikely ever to be superceded.
Barry Unsworth, author of Sacred Hunger
Review
andldquo;Masterly.andrdquo;andmdash;
Adam Hochschild,
The New York Times Book Reviewandldquo;Searingly brilliant.andrdquo;andmdash;Los Angeles Times Book Review
andldquo; I was hardly prepared for the profound emotional impact of The Slave Ship: A Human History. Reading it established a transformative and never to be severed bond with my African ancestors who were cargo in slave ships over a period of four centuries.andrdquo;andmdash;Alice Walker
andldquo; The Slave Ship is the best of histories, deeply researched, brilliantly formulated, and morally informed.andrdquo;andmdash;Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone
Review
andldquo;Masterly.andrdquo;andmdash;
Adam Hochschild,
The New York Times Book Reviewandldquo;Searingly brilliant.andrdquo;andmdash;Los Angeles Times Book Review
andldquo; I was hardly prepared for the profound emotional impact of The Slave Ship: A Human History. Reading it established a transformative and never to be severed bond with my African ancestors who were cargo in slave ships over a period of four centuries.andrdquo;andmdash;Alice Walker
andldquo; The Slave Ship is the best of histories, deeply researched, brilliantly formulated, and morally informed.andrdquo;andmdash;Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone
Review
and#8220;Gripping...Superb...As Marcus Redikerand#8217;s new book reminds us, the place of the [Amistad] rebellion in popular memory hasnand#8217;t always been secure.and#8221;--The Nation and#160;
Review
and#8220;The great strength of this workand#8212;aside from redikerand#8217;s vivd style as a writer and meticulous researchand#8212;is that he brings the Amistad Africans back to center stage where they have often been pushed to the side.and#8221;and#8212;
Pittsburgh Post-GazetteReview
Vividly drawnand#8230;this stunning book honors the achievement of the captive Africans who fought forand#8212;and wonand#8212;their freedom.and#8221;and#8212;
The Philadelphia TribuneReview
and#8220;Spectacularly researched and fluidly composed, this latest study offers some much needed perspective on a critical yet often overlooked event in Americaand#8217;s history.and#8221;--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
"A totally enthralling account of the Amistad rebellion and its place in the broader American story of revolt against a great threat to liberty."--Booklist (starred review)
Review
"A first-rate example of history told from the bottom up."--
Kirkus (starred review) and#160;
Review
"Rediker takes a fresh approach to the Amistad rebellion by focusing on the Africans who revolted rather than on the American political and judicial response, which takes the central place in most previous works."--Library Journal
Synopsis
The missing link in the chain of American slavery For three centuries slave ships carted millions of people from the coasts of Africa across the Atlantic to the Americas. Much is known of the slave trade and the American plantation system, but little of the ships that made it all possible. 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. He reconstructs in chilling detail the lives, deaths, and terrors of captains, sailors, and the enslaved aboard a floating dungeon trailed by sharks. From the young African kidnapped from his village and sold into slavery by a neighboring tribe to the would-be priest who takes a job as a sailor on a slave ship only to be horrified at 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.
This is a tale of tragedy and terror, but also an epic of resilience, survival, and the creation of something entirely new. Marcus Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern economy was made.
Synopsis
The riveting account of the slave ship rebellion told for the first time from the slavesandrsquo; perspectiveThe slave ship Amistad set sail from Havana on July 2, 1839, on a routine delivery of human cargo. A few days into its voyage, the fifty-three African captives aboard would seize control and steer a new courseandmdash;one that took them to freedom and ultimately into history.
Though the Amistad rebellion has been celebrated in films and books, its story has largely been told through the eyes of white abolitionists, with the Supreme Court victory by the Africans as the ultimate triumph. Now, Marcus Redikerandrsquo;s captivating new history turns the lens on the Africans themselves. Using the story of their horrific plight back to the roots of their shared culture a continent away, he reframes the Amistad story as a crucial moment in the great chain of resistance stretching from the earliest slave revolts through the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century.
Synopsis
In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British and American slave ships of the eighteenth century. Drawing on thirty years of research in maritime archives, court records, diaries, and firsthand accounts,
The Slave Ship is riveting and sobering in its revelations, reconstructing in chilling detail a world nearly lost to history: the ?floating dungeons? at the forefront of the birth of African American culture.
Synopsis
A unique account of the most successful slave rebellion in American historyand#151;from the award-winning author of The Slave Ship In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the Amistad rebellion for its true proponents: the enslaved Africans who risked death to stake a claim for freedom. Using newly discovered evidence and featuring vividly drawn portraits of the rebels, their captors, and their abolitionist allies, Rediker reframes the story to show how a small group of courageous men fought and won an epic battle against Spanish and American slaveholders and their governments. The successful Amistad rebellion changed the very nature of the struggle against slavery. As a handful of self-emancipated Africans steered their own course for freedom, they opened a way for millions to follow.
About the Author
Marcus Rediker is a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of
The Slave Ship: A Human History, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Merle Curti Award,and#160; and (with Peter Linebaugh)
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailor, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.