Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

A captive-centered history of the Atlantic slave trade arguing that the Middle Passage produced not just forced migration but a distinct condition — saltwater slavery — defined by coastal confinement, oceanic shipment, dispersal through sale, and the long afterlife of that rupture in diasporic communities. Smallwood anchors her analysis in the Gold Coast, tracing how commodification remade persons into exchangeable cargo at the littoral before the crossing, and how survivors rebuilt belonging and kinship in the Americas through shipmate bonds and ritual memory.