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Slavery at Sea

Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage

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About this listen

Most times left solely within the confine of plantation narratives, slavery was far from a land-based phenomenon. This book reveals for the first time how it took critical shape at sea. Expanding the gaze even more widely, the book centers on how the oceanic transport of human cargoes - known as the infamous Middle Passage - comprised a violently regulated process foundational to the institution of bondage.

Sowande' Mustakeem's groundbreaking study goes inside the Atlantic slave trade to explore the social conditions and human costs embedded in the world of maritime slavery. Mining ship logs, records, and personal documents, Mustakeem teases out the social histories produced between those on traveling ships: slaves, captains, sailors, and surgeons. As she shows, crewmen manufactured captives through enforced dependency, relentless cycles of physical, psychological terror, and pain that led to the making - and unmaking - of enslaved Africans held and transported onboard slave ships. Mustakeem relates how this process, and related power struggles, played out not just for adult men, but also for women, children, teens, infants, nursing mothers, the elderly, diseased, ailing, and dying.

©2016 the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (P)2021 Tantor Americas Black & African American Maritime History & Piracy Social Sciences United States World Africa
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There is a good story somewhere in this book but it is so badly written it beggars belief..... The introduction is full of intellectual gobbledegook... it uses 10 words when one would suffice. The English language is mangled throughout the whole book.
To add insult to injury the narration is even worse than the prose. I am certain the author must have used full stops and commas but the narrator rumbles on at the same pace with barely a pause. The whole book is read at the same monotonous cadence.... overall a waste of my money.....

Appalling!! Badly written... badly narrated...

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The narrator really let down an intresting peice. Could not finish, work itself was good

Poor performance

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