The following is a review of Stephanie Smallwood's Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. It was composed in January of 2013 for Dr. Brad Austin's course on slavery in New England, taught at Salem State University, Salem, Massachusetts.
Saltwater
Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
traces the experiences of slaves brought to English New World colonies from the
Gold Coast between 1675 and 1725 through analyzing the correspondence and
journals of slave traders. Such sources, Smallwood asserts, can provide us with
a greater understanding of the experience of forced Atlantic migration for
Africans than does the more commonly relied upon sources that merely quantify
the experience. Reliance on the “more hidden, internal transcript” renders both
the slave trader and the African slaves subjects, rather than objects. (5)
Smallwood quite consciously neglects to discuss at any length such topics as
the development of European seafaring technology, European political
developments prior to and during the Atlantic slave trade, and the advent of the
plantation system in the New World. Her focus is the experience of African
slaves from the beginning of their forced Atlantic journey until its conclusion
in the New World.
Smallwood begins with the Portuguese
pursuit of gold along the West African coast for the first three-quarters of
the fifteenth century. European trade accelerated the shift from a migratory to
a settled lifestyle. The introduction of maize contributed to a population
boom, and the introduction of guns augmented the scale of warfare. Most people
exported as slaves were initially reduced to this status by defeat in war.
However, the Gold Coast was initially in
fact an importer of slaves, importing
in excess of 12,000 slaves between 1475 and 1540. From the 1520s onward few
slaves were either imported or exported from the area, and finally in 1619 the
first slave ship with the intention of purchasing, rather than selling, slaves
arrived at the Gold Coast. The scale of the export of slaves finally overtook the
scale of the export of gold at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Slavery existed in pre-colonial Africa.
European trade dramatically altered the scale, and ultimately the characteristics,
of this trade, however. Smallwood’s book traces the implications of these
changes for the enslaved people, beginning with enslavement in Africa,
transportation across the Atlantic, and sale in the New World.
Smallwood borrows the term “saltwater
slavery” from New World slaves who used it to derisively refer to new arrivals
from Africa. Smallwood uses the term to refer to the period beginning with
imprisonment on the shores of West Africa and ending with sale in the New
World. The linear direction of this forced migration, the completeness of the
severance between the slave and their original community, and the severity of
the commodification imposed upon them are what fundamentally distinguish this
experience from the experience of slaves who remained in Africa. In Africa, a
slave was assimilated into a new community, albeit with a lowly status. In
Africa, “even those at the bottom of the social hierarchy were bound in a
mutually obligatory relationship to some corporate group.” Those transported to
the New World, however, “inhabited a new category of marginalization, one not
of extreme alienation within the
community, but rather of absolute exclusion from any community.” (30)
What distinguishes Smallwood’s book is
her emphasis on the psychological experiences of transatlantic slaves. “For the
most part…historians have described the slave ship’s lethal nature the same way
the slave traders did”—quantitatively. (137) Smallwood demonstrates “the
limitations of quantitative analysis” by describing the entries of a slave
trader’s journal. “His words convey the traumatic content that shaped the
captives’ own ‘account’—a man’s determination to commit his own body to the sea
(and confront the danger that action entailed for his soul), a woman’s
unwillingness to abandon her duties as a mother aboard ship, a man’s desperate
search for a private place to endure his illness.” (151)
While Smallwood makes the valuable
contribution of investigating the psychological and emotional pain of the
transatlantic voyage for enslaved Africans, she occasionally does so with
writing that feels artificially academic. To describe the disorientation and
psychological agony of being divorced from all of the cultural and spiritual
practices of one’s community, she speaks of the “uniquely inhumane spatial and
temporal setting of the slave ship at sea”; and how “landing on American soil
put Africans into a new relationship to time-space.” Metaphysics, epistemology,
and cosmography are each referred to in contexts in which her use of such
terminology serves to distract from the content of her statements.
In addition, while the title Saltwater Slavery is well-chosen in both
indicating the segment of a New World slave’s experience that Smallwood is
investigating and in highlighting the utter alienation that such slaves
experienced (by reminding us that the slave communities which they were to
enter looked upon them as foreign), Smallwood uses the term constantly
throughout the book. “It affords an analytical and conceptual category that
defines the Atlantic in historical time and place in a fresh way.” She seeks to
consider “the ‘saltwater’ dimension of slaves’ lives.” (8) It is highly
doubtful that subsequent scholars will adopt the term, which feels more like a
gimmick appropriate only as a title, but not “an analytical and conceptual
category.”
Smallwood’s method, by turning the
writings of slave traders into avenues for the investigation of the experiences
of transatlantic slaves, vastly increases the quantity of sources available for
those who wish to pursue such investigations. A quantitative reckoning of the
Atlantic slave trade is vital for placing such experiences in historical
context, but Smallwood elaborates on the psychological context of the Atlantic
slave trade and focuses in on vignettes of experiences at the scale of the
individual.
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