Bibliographic Essay

Slavery and the transatlantic slave trade have attracted a large literature. A first-rate short history is Kenneth Morgan, A Short History of Transatlantic Slavery (London: I. B.

The publication of a large-scale database providing detailed empirical information about the Atlantic slave trade has fuelled a series of books that concentrate on the lived experience of captive Africans on board ship: the website is www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces. It builds on the pioneering work of Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). The slave trade database deals with transatlantic voyages. For intercolonial voyages, see Gregory D. O'Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) and Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright, 2016).

The best account of a single journey is Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Works that deal with the slave ship and the experience of captives and sailors are Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007); Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).

An excellent work on a very notorious case is James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), but see also Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005) for an ambitious attempt to link the Zong with the language of mercantile finance. For detailed social histories of African slave ports see Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’ 1727-1892 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004); Randy Sparks, Where the Negroes are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Stephen D. Behrendt (ed.), The Diary of Antera Duke: An Eighteenth Century African Slave Trader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). For slave resistance in the middle passage, see David Richardson, ‘Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series 58.

The Atlantic slave trade was essential to the development of plantation agriculture in the Americas. For an overview of the development of the plantation system, see Simon Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For work in the plantation system, see Justin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honour, Pleasure and Profit: Plantation Management in the Chesapeake, 1607-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). For how the violence of the slave trade was continued into plantation life, see Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). For how slavery worked in different plantation regimes, see Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in British Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).