Review of Jane Webster, Materializing the Middle Passage

International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2008

This study describes the archaeological investigations that have taken place at the wreck site of the English slave ship Henrietta Marie (1700) since its location in 1972. Information is provided on the methodology utilized during on-site archaeological data recovery, and the artifacts retrieved from the wreck site are described in detail. An account of complimentary documentary research on this wrecked slaver is also presented. Contemporary historical data gleaned from shipping lists, slaver’s logs, seamen’s wills and other sources are utilized to place Henrietta Marie within her proper context as a vehicle involved in the notorious transatlantic slave trade.

1997

2016

This dissertation studies the enslavement of Africans through the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It focuses principally on the trans-Atlantic slave trade organized by Britons, a trade that involved 3.2 million enslaved people. Drawing principally on the records of slave trading merchants, this dissertation reconstructs the individual stages of an enslaved African's tortuous journey into slavery, a multi-year "Long Middle Passage" that dwarfed the ten-week ocean voyage that has been the focus of so much scholarly attention to date. I break the Long Middle Passage into five distinct stages to each of which I devote a chapter: initial enslavement; sale on the African coast; the Middle Passage; sale in the Americas; and the "seasoning." An African's age, gender, and especially their health, shaped the direction that they took through the Long Middle Passage, because slave traders constantly sorted and sold people according to their physical attributes. The age and gender of enslaved Africans embarking on slave ships was shaped by the internal African slave trade, which resulted in varying proportions of men, women, and children moving to particular regions of the coast. European ship captains carefully selected enslaved people according to stringent criteria, and so Africans entering Atlantic slavery were typically young and healthy. The crowded and unsanitary conditions on slave ships, explored in the third chapter of this thesis, debilitated large numbers of people. As a result, as many as a fifth of the enslaved people arriving in the Americas were sickly depending on where in Africa enslaved people had been carried from. American slave traders sold arriving Africans by sorting them according to their age and health and then vending them to colonial buyers of varying economic stature. Adults and children, and the sickly and the healthy, subsequently took divergent paths into American slavery and ultimately faced very different seasoning regimes. This dissertation argues, therefore, that the individual processes that comprised the Long Middle Passage powerfully shaped the forced migration of enslaved Africans in the Americas.

African American Review, 2014

Reviews in American History, 2018

HJEAS, 2019

Lumen: Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1997

Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'

ISLAS: Official Publication of the Afro-Cuban Alliance, Inc. Year 2, No. 8, , 2007

2011a Chapter 27: The Archaeology of Steamships. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime Archaeology, Donny L. Hamilton, Ben Ford, and Alexis Catsambis, eds. Oxford University Press, pp. 610-628.