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“[I]t is easy to confuse European interest in preserving life to prevent economic loss with positive concern for the captives’ human welfare. But to interpret the regime of the slave ship in that way is to be duped by the slave traders’ rhetoric—a language of concealment that allowed European slaving concerns to portray themselves as passive and powerless before the array of forces (including the agency of the captives themselves) outside their control. Slave merchants and their backers disguised from themselves the ugly truth that the Atlantic regime of commodification took captives from fully realized humanity and suspended them in a purgatory in between tenuous life and dishonorable death.”

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Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas. In this regard, the economic enterprise of human trafficking marked a watershed in what would become an enduring project in the modern Western world: probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within. The aim in the case being economic efficiency rather than punishment, this was a regime whose intent was not to torture but rather to manage the depletion of life that resulted from the conditions of saltwater slavery. But for the Africans who were starved, sorted, and warped to make them into saltwater slaves, torture was the result. It takes no great insight to point to the role of violence in the Atlantic slave trade. But to understand what happened to Africans in this system of human trafficking requires us to ask precisely what kind of violence it requires to achieve its end, the transformation of African captives into Atlantic commodities.”

HumanitySlaveryFree WillCommodificationHumanization
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“Turning captives into commodities was a thoroughly scientific enterprise. It turned on perfecting the practices required to commodify people and determining where those practices reached their outer limits (that is, the point at which they extinguished the lives they were meant to sustain in commodified form). Traders reduced people to the sum of their biological parts, thereby scaling life down to an arithmetical equation and finding the lowest common denominator.”

Free WillDehumanizationCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“The slave ship at sea reduced African captives to an existence so physically atomized as to silence all but the most elemental bodily articulation, so socially impoverished as to threaten annihilation of the self, the complete disintegration of personhood. Here their commodification built toward a crescendo that threatened never to arrive, but to leave the African captives suspended in an agony whose language no one knew.”

TraumaDehumanizationCommodificationMiddle Passage
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“Whereas the slave cargoes gathered on the African coast reconfigured the normative boundaries of social life, the slave communities in the Americas exploded those boundaries beyond recognition. If an Akan-speaking migrant lived to complete a year on a west Indian sugar estate, he or she was likely by the end of that time to have come into close contact with unrelated Akan strangers as well as with Ga, Guan, or Adangbe speakers in the holding station on the African littoral, with Ewe speakers on the slave ship, and with Angolans, Biafrans, and Senegambians on the plantation. This was the composite we call diasporic Africa—an Africa that constituted not the continent on European maps, but rather the plurality of remembered places immigrant slaves carried with them. Like any geographic entity, diasporic Africa varies according to the perspective from which it is surveyed. Viewed from a cartographic standpoint (in essence, the view of early modern Europeans), diasporic Africa is a constellation of discrete ethnic and language groups; if one adopts this perspective, the defining question becomes whether or not the various constituent groups in the slave community shared a culture. Only by approaching these questions from the vantage point of Africans as migrants, however, can we hope to understand how Africans themselves experienced and negotiated their American worlds. If in the regime of the market Africans’ most socially relevant feature was their exchangeability, for Africans as immigrants the most socially relevant feature was their isolation, their desperate need to restore some measure of social life to counterbalance the alienation engendered by their social death. Without some means of achieving that vital equilibrium thanks to which even the socially dead could expect to occupy a viable place in society, slaves could foresee only further descent into an endless purgatory.”

CommunitySlaveryCommodificationAfrican Diaspora
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“The imperatives of a market that valued people as commodities interposed a nearly impassable gulf between captives and any community that might claim them as new members. Captives learned that when they reached the littoral, their exchangeability on the Atlantic market outweighed any social value they might have. The price put on their persons pushed most captives beyond the possibility of eventual reintegration as members in any community. The crisis of captivity on that coast, in other words, was that only with great difficulty or great luck could the prisoners’ ‘commodity potential’ be masked or converted back into social currency.”

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Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“Undoing their objectivization as goods to be bought and sold, therefore, required not only that captives escape the physical hold exerted on them by the forts, factories, and other coastal facilities used to incarcerate them but, more difficult still, that they reverse their own transformation into commodities, by returning to a web of social bonds that would tether them safely to the African landscape, within the fold of kinship and community. For most, as we have seen, distance made return to their home communities impossible. The market, they learned, made return to any form of social belonging impossible as well. If they managed to escape from the waterside forts and factories, their value resided not in their potential to join communities as slave laborers, wives, soldiers, or in some other capacity, but rather in their market price. For most, the power of the market made it impossible to return to their previous state, that of belonging to (being ‘owned’ by) a community—to being possessed, that is, of an identity as a subject. Rather, the strangers the runaways encountered shared the vision of the officials at Cape Coast Castle: the laws of the market made fellow human beings see it as their primary interest to own as commodities these escaped captives, rather than to connection them as social subjects. More often than not, then, captives escaped only to be sold again. As Snelgrave’s language articulates so clearly, the logic of the market meant that enslavement was a misfortune for which no buyer needed to feel the burden of accountability. Indeed, according to the mercantile logic in force, buyers (of whatever nationality) could not bear the weight of political accountability. Buying people who had no evidence social value was not a violation or an act of questionable morality but rather a keen and appropriate response to opportunity; for this was precisely what one was supposed to do in the market: create value by exchange, recycle someone else’s castoffs into objects of worth. Thus, then, did the market exert its power—through its language, its categories, its logic. The alchemy of the market derived from its effectiveness in producing a counterfeit representation; it had become plausible that human beings could be so completely drained of social value, so severed from the community, that their lives were no longer beyond price: they could be made freely available in exchange for currency. The market painted in colors sufficiently believable as to seem true the appalling notion that ‘a human being could fail to be a person.”

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Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“The ledger’s double-entry pages and the neat grid of the invoice gave purposeful shape to the story they told. Through their graphic simplicity and economy, invoices and ledgers effaced the personal histories that fueled the slaving economy. Containing only what could fit within the clean lines of their columns and rows, they reduced an enormous system of traffic in human commodities to a concise chronicle of quantitative ‘facts.’ Thus, Mary Poove writes, ‘like the closet, the conventions of double-entry bookkeeping were intended to manage or contain excess.’ Instruments such as these did their work, then, while concealing the messiness of history, erasing from view the politics that underlay the neat account keeping. The slave traders (and much of the modern economic literature on the slave trade) regarded the slave ship’s need for volume as a self-evident ‘fact’ of economic rationalization: the Board of Trade’s reports, the balance pursued in the Royal African Company’s double-entry ledgers, the calculations that determined how many captive bodies a ship could ‘conveniently stow,’ the simple equation by which an agent at the company’s factory at Whydah promised ‘to Complie with delivering in every ten days 100 Negroes.’ But the perceptions of the African captives themselves differed from the slave trader’s economies of scale and rationalized efficiency of production. What appears in the European quantitative account as a seamless expansion in the volume of slave exports—evidence of the natural workings of the market—took the form of violent rifts in the political geography of the Gold Coast. People for whom the Atlantic market had been a distant and hazy presence with little direct consequence for their lives now found themselves swept up in wars and siphoned into a type of captivity without precedent.”

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Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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