The Slave Ship: A Human History

A maritime history from below treating the slave ship as a historical actor — a floating prison, war machine, labor regime, and factory for the production of plantation workers, white sailors, and racialized categories — rather than a neutral corridor between Africa and the Americas. Rediker moves among captains, sailors, captives, abolitionists, and survivors to show how the ship concentrated violence, terror, and improvisation, and argues that the voyage itself helped produce race formation and shipmate kinship as enduring social forms.