Commodification

Commodification of persons in the Atlantic slave trade was not a single moment but a process that began before embarkation — at the littoral, the coastal fort, and the market — where independent people were converted into human commodities whose value resided in their exchangeability. Violence, hunger, surveillance, and calibrated suffering were part of this conversion. The process continued on the ship, where bodies were catalogued by age, sex, and apparent health, and extended into the plantation, where labor-power was extracted as ongoing value.