So I will say that I think I didn't like this more because of the time pressures under which I had to read it, but I often found it hard to follow and in some ways it must have really been fundamental to the field because I wasn't entirely sure what about it was new? There were definitely parts that were important, and I think Smallwood's framework of tracing this shift from person to commodity to slave is important but to me it just sort of jumbled together a lot and I wasn't sure exactly what she was getting at at different points. Again, I think more of that has to do with the way that I experienced this book than the book itself, but that's where it left me at the end. I would like to go back some day and reread it with a bit more care, it just wasn't a possibility at this time. ( )

In Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, Stephanie E. Smallwood examines the interaction between Europeans and Africans in the Gold Coast slave trade during the seventeenth through eighteenth centuries. Smallwood herself describes the subject, writing, “Saltwater Slavery brings the people aboard slave ships to life as subjects in American social history.”
Smallwood seeks to better understand the perspectives of slaves in the Atlantic World of the Middle Passage by reading between the lines of European documents to tease out the slaves’ narratives. Smallwood writes, “Considering the ‘saltwater’ dimension of slaves’ lives allows us to piece together a picture of a place, a time, and an experience that does not otherwise figure into the archival record.”
Smallwood argues that the coasts represented a key boundary, for example, between slavery as Africans understood it in the interior of Africa and how Europeans commodified it at the littoral. Similarly between the world of the slave ship and the needs of plantation owners in the Americas. Smallwood writes, “On the coast, captives were marked as commodities both physically and figuratively…As a result, captives and those who claimed to own them understood that saltwater slavery menaced them with ‘social death’ of unprecedented proportions.” Once aboard the ships, “slaves became, for the purpose of transatlantic shipment, mere physical units that could be arranged and molded at will.” The ships represented the boundary where power dynamics turned people into objects. Having crossed the Atlantic, slavers found that “the commodities they sold to American buyers were not the same commodities purchased on the African coast” due to the ravages of disease and violence both physical and psychological.
Smallwood’s discussion of commodifying slaves draws a great deal from Michel Foucault. Broadly speaking, Smallwood’s entire argument follows a Foucauldian discourse of power, especially when she describes relations of slaves to one another based on ethic similarities or differences. Smallwood also relies heavily on African studies to supplement her analysis of the primary sources.
For her method, Smallwood relies on official documents such as ledgers and more informal documents, comprising “internal correspondence between and among officials in London and agents stationed in Africa and the Americas.” She also includes various journals and other marginalia to create a fuller picture, observing that “it is in the dissonances between these two accounts that we can discern something of the captives’ own testimony.” ( )

Note: I read this book as a UMI copy of the author's dissertation. I doubt that the differences with the published version would be such as to detract from my comments.

Smallwood notes in her introduction that although the literature on various aspects of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic slave trade has expanded rapidly in recent decades, there is no single volume that attempts to trace the movement of enslaved Africans from their homes in Africa, through the middle passage to their final destination enslaved on New World plantations (assuming they managed to live through the ordeal). This book is a generally successful effort to tell such a unified story.

{I'll fill in the rest later} ( )