Materializing the Middle Passage

Abstract

An estimated 2.8 million Africans made a forced crossing of the Atlantic on British slave ships: a journey known as the ‘Middle Passage’. This book focuses on the ship itself: the largest artefact of the transatlantic slave trade, but one rarely studied by archaeologists, because so few examples of wrecked slaving vessels have been located. This book argues that there are other ways for archaeologists to materialize the slave ship. It employs a pioneering interdisciplinary methodology combining primary documentary sources, underwater and terrestrial archaeological data, paintings, and museum collections, to ‘rebuild’ British slaving vessels and identify changes to them over time. The book then considers the reception of the slave ship and its trade goods in coastal West Africa, and goes on to detail the range, and uses, of the many African materials (such as ivory) entering Britain on slave ships. The third section considers the Middle Passage experiences of captives and crews, arguing that greater attention needs to be paid to the coping mechanisms through which Africans survived, yet also challenged, their captive passage. Finally, the book asks why the African Middle Passage experience remains so elusive and considers when, how, and why the crossing was remembered by ‘saltwater’ Africans in the Caribbean and North America. The marriage of words and things attempted in this richly illustrated book is underpinned throughout by a theoretical perspective combining creolization and postcolonial theory, and by a central focus on the materiality of the slave ship and its regimes