From Numbers to Life Histories: The Transatlantic Trade
Class slides Numbers to Life Histories
Please read Eltis; then choose ONE of the other core readings.
Content warning: potentially upsetting content in the Dorsey and Rediker readings (though the context for all the readings is painful).
Seminar Questions
- Who/what shaped the volume and nature of the transatlantic slave trade?
- How was the trade shaped by gendered power and reproductive labour?
- What were the functions of the slave ship?
- What are the advantages or disadvantages of qualitative and quantitative approaches?
- Does our view of the trade look different if we "start" with African histories of slavery (how)?
- What new perspectives on the Atlantic trade does Hicks' examination of Black sailors in the South Atlantic offer?
Core reading:
Eltis, David. 鈥淭he Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Trade: A Reassessment.鈥� William and Mary Quarterly, 58: 1 (2001): 17-47.
Lovejoy, Paul. : A History of Slavery in Africa. Chapter 1: 鈥淎frica and Slavery.鈥� CUP 2012 (third edition).
Paton, Diana. "Gender History, Global History, and Atlantic Slavery: On Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction." American Historical Review, 127:2 (June 2022): 726-754
Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History. London: John Murray, 2007.
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- 鈥泪苍迟谤辞诲耻肠迟颈辞苍,鈥� pp. 1-13.
- Ch. 3, pp. 73-107.
Mary Hicks, . Omohundro Institute, 2024. Introduction
Further reading:
Primary sources:
Explore the maps, data and essays in Voyages:
Primary sources on Brazil: Robert Conrad, Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil, ch 1
Dorsey, Joseph. Dorsey, Joseph C. 鈥淚t Hurt Very Much at the Time: Rape Culture, Patriarchy, and the Slave Body-Semiotic.鈥� In The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean, ed. Linden Lewis, 294-322. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003 [content warning: distressing content]
Law, Robin, and Kristin Mann, 鈥淲est Africa in the Atlantic Community: the Case of the Slave Coast.鈥� William & Mary Quarterly, 56:2 (April 1999): 307-334.
Eltis, David. 鈥淔ree and Coerced Migrations: the Atlantic in Global Perspective,鈥� European Review, 12 (2004): 313-28.
- Jennifer Nelson, "The Mixed Commission and Emancipated Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro" (MA dissertation, University of Leeds, 2011), chapter 1: "Case study of the slave ship the Brilhante," pp 24-52.
* Joseph Miller Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830. University of Wisconsin Press, 1988
* Paul E Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. 2012, intro and chapter on the nineteenth century
* Stephanie Smallwood, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Mustakeem, Sowande鈥�. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. Urbana and Springfield: University of Illinoi Press, 2016.