Title: Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to America
Author: Stephanie Smallwood
Year of Publication: 2007
Thesis:
To Smallwood, the existence of an overarching market system that heavily integrated slavery determined how Africans would set up roots and develop community as they were forced across the Atlantic. To make sense of their lives, Africans experiencing the the Middle Passage had to quickly adapt specifc cultural understandings in a culturally and ethnically heterogeneous environment to both make sense of their experiences to survive it, especially as a constant sense of timelessness was imposed on them though multiple and overlapping migrations. (202) Further, she argues that Africans were forced migrants - if anything they made themselves into immigrants as they weighed their options. (183) They did so by orienting themselves as mentioned above, creating kinship, and developing ways to deal with enslavement. (183) This book makes good of use of difficult sources mixed with quantitative data to access enslaved people's lives.
Time: 1675-1725
Geography:
British Atlantic / Senegambia / Gold Coast / Calabar / Madagascar (2)
Organization:
Introduction
- Focuses on the manufacture of enslavement, with the ship as the main site of this process.
- One-way journey for enslaved people
1. The Gold Coast and the Atlantic Market in People
- Pursuit of gold by Portuguese
- Maize coming from Americas
2. Turning African Captives into Atlantic Commodities
- exchangeability in the market
- formation requires physical and social violence (35)
- Sees the beginning of manufacture on the coast (38)
- Looks at the physical space - how it is constructed (38) - this relates to carpentry & Newton
- Apparatus - chains, bolts, etc. (41)
- Science, efficiency, and slavery go together (43)
- Access to food limited/restricted (44)
- Looks at Social Death here (52)
- The Market as key
- "The collective assault of the practices used to herd together captives at the littoral was greater than the sum of its parts. Physical in- carceration and social alienation played a role; but ultimately the power of these and other constraints lay not in their immediate ma- terial effect but in the overarching system justifying the commodi- fication of Africans. The most powerful instrument locking captives in as commodities for Atlantic trade was the culture of the market itself." (56)
- Social death as power - from Patterson:
"Patterson suggests, moreover, that in many slaveholding societies the social death of the slave functioned pre- cisely to empower him to navigate, in his liminality, through be- twixt-and-between places where full members of society could not. In some societies, the liminal status of the slave empowered him to undertake roles in the spiritual world, such as handling the bodies of the deceased, that were dangerous to full members of society. “Being socially dead, the captives were able to move between the living and the dead without suffering the supernatural harm in- evitably experienced by the socially alive in such boundary cross- ing." (50)
- Captives escaped & were often recaptured (63)
- Kinship is able to rebuild on the coast (64)
3. The Political Economy of the Slave Ship
- Describes the slave ship
- Enslaved people make up profitability of other legs that are less profitable (68)
- *Molding of enslaved people, but given Newton - aren't slave ships being molded to enslaved people? (68)
- Analyzes Royal Afr Company stats.
- Upper decks are NECESSARY to make this profitable / utilize the ship (76)
- Demand for enslaved people outstripping supply in 17th cent. Benin (88)
4. The Anomalous Intimacies of the Slave Cargo
- How enslaved people formed bonds despite many ethnicities in one place (105)
- Trying to figure out if people are more likely to bond when from the same place
- Regions are not exact b/c slave traders aren't exact
- Akan people's - connection to the land and matriclan societies important
- Oral traditions show us "states" bound in different ways
5. The Living Dead aboard the Slave Ship at Sea
- Competing narratives of merchant exploits and African experiences (muted)
- Equiano's childhood
- Made the Atlantic knowable in their own terms (equiano & work for example) (126)
6. Turning Atlantic Commodities into American Slaves
7. Life and Death in Diaspora
- As forced migrants, not immigrants (unless they built this themselves)
- intent to return & reverse the commodification (sometimes through death) (186)
- American slavery as the reality - how to cope with it? (187)
- Multiple diasporas (187)
- American-born communities were not immediate (201)
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Type:
Methods: Uses the trajectory of a journey through the Middle Passage.
Sources:
British correspondence & especially internal correspondence, Royal African Company, "ledgers, bills of lading," "voyage journals"(4), Slave Trade Database
Historiography:
Fits in well with Middle Passage Studies. Sowande Mustakeem's Slavery at Sea is a good complement. Often paired with Rediker.
Keywords:
"Salt-Water" designated "newcomer" enslaved person (7)
forced emigration (7)
chain migration (192)
demographic catastrophy
fictive kinship (198)
littoral (35)
Virtual kinlessness (61)
Themes:
Women having key roles in caring for Africans newly arrived (197)
Critiques:
From Vincent Brown - (https://www.nanoshlucas.com/comps-prep-1/2021/1/4/brown-v-2009-social-death-and-political-life-in-the-study-of-slavery-the-american-historical-review-1145-12311249):
- Smallwood/Hartman - social death as product of commodification, though Smallwood’s interventions are deeper, argues Brown (1240)
- Smallwood - strongly explores the tension of the intent to turn people into things - essentially, the harder master’s tried, the more they found resistance everywhere (this almost seems like the reverse of Genovese?) (pull quote -1241)
- Smallwood points out how important it was for Africans to define the slave ship in some form that would help them conceptualize the experience.
Questions:
Quotes:
"In place of the networks that link origins and departures, and transform the emigrant into an immigrant, for African captives in the Atlantic system reverberated the traumatic echo of commodification: the return of the slave ship, the arrival of new exiles into American slavery, the renewed imprint of the saltwater on the African diaspora." (7)
It affords an analytical and conceptual cate- gory that defines the Atlantic in historical time and place in a fresh way. It places the emphasis not on the African “background” of American slavery, on migration (focusing on captive Africans as “migrants” instead of “slaves”), or on the “middle passage” as a metaphor for all that was wrong with New World slavery. Instead, the concept of saltwater slavery illuminates what forced migration entailed. (8)
"Such an analysis of what happened to captive Africans in the Atlantic offers something we cannot get at simply by including Africa in our histories of Afri- can America or by singling out African captives as involuntary mi- grants or by naming the Atlantic crossing the middle passage. Here is a history of American slavery that begins in Africa and the Atlan- tic, in the saltwater slavery of peoples in motion, a diaspora shaped by violence encompassing the African, Atlantic, and American arenas of captivity, commodification, and enslavement." (189)
"The cultures they produced do not reflect the simple transfer and continuation of Africa in the Americas but rather reflect the elaboration of specific cultural content and its transformation to meet the particular needs of slave life in the Atlantic system: their need to reassert some kind of healthy relationship to an- cestors; to manage death; to produce social networks, communities, and relations of kinship; to address the imbalance of power be- tween black and white; to stake a claim to their bodies to counter the plantation economy’s claim to ownership." (190)
On the migrant chain:
"The migrant chain that connected Africa to America was seem- ingly endless, however, and its length was due primarily to the mar- ket. Africans made to “buy more” Africans were thus compelled to be the agents of their own exploitation by an economic system that consumed the very lives of slaves." (199)
On connection:
"Rather than reflecting the absence of connection, therefore, the African migration produced a unique kind of connection. The echo produced by the serial repetition of one-way departures, the voices of saltwater slaves, could not reverberate back to Africa." (201)
Significance of salt water:
The saltwater in African memory, then, was perhaps the antithesis of a “middle” passage, with all that phrase implies about a smooth, linear progression leading to a known end. For many in the pioneering generations of slaves, there could be no such integration of the terror of Atlantic memory." (207)
On the process of commodification:
"The littoral, therefore, was more than a site of economic ex- change and incarceration. The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas. In this re- gard, the economic enterprise of human trafficking marked a watershed in what would become an enduring project in the modern Western world: probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within." (36)
On sustenance:
"made this an exceedingly narrow range within which to subsist: between abject and benign starvation, between the absolute or near absence of food at worst and daily rations even at best too scanty and nutritionally limited to supply nourishment beyond a minimal level. Captives passed this time negotiating an unpredictable course between reliable sustenance and starvation. Some recovered their physical strength, but some also starved to death." (49)
Turning death on its head:
"In this sense, the departure and displacement of the dead produced migrations that sustained connection, by carrying the soul of the deceased to the realm of the ancestors and returning the personality of the deceased to the realm of the living, reincarnated in the body of a newborn. Death thereby preserved and indeed strengthened an un- broken continuity (indeed, such circularity was central to many precolonial African conceptualizations of time)." (58-59)
Notes:
largest international migration in history (pre-19th century) (192)