John Thornton and Marcus Rediker on Transatlantic Slave Trade

John Thornton, Africans and Afro-Americans in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin, 2007)



Accompanying with the overseas expansion of European empires in the world, African slaves were captured and transported into the Americas. During their trips to the Americas, they suffered a lot. In the past years, historians have greatly helped us to understand their lives and history through examining their living conditions. But historians still debate with each other on how to interpret it? In this paper, rather than discuss how past historians have considered this topic, instead, focusing on Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History, John Thornton’s Africans and Afro-Americans in the Atlantic World, and David Eltis’s essay——The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment, I am going to discuss their methodologies, as well as their contributions in helping us to understand the transatlantic slave trade since the 16th century.

Both John Thornton and Marcus Rediker discuss the experiences of African slaves when they were crossing the Middle Passage, but they approach to it rather differently. Thornton believes that “it was a common experience that nearly all newly arrived slaves shared through the Middle Passage,” although their trips were both “uncomfortable and dangerous.” During their Atlantic trips, Thornton points out, African slaves suffered undernourishment, dehydration, seasickness and vomits, which created “an environment that rapidly became nauseatingly odorous.” Under these bad conditions, many African slaves were died on their way to Americas. In order to decrease their mortality and increase profits, Europeans merchants and slave-holders attempted to improve their living conditions, because they believed that their death were caused by poor food. In 1642, the Dutch commander of Luanda, Pieter Mortamer noted that the slaves only “a little palm oil and a bit of cooked corn.” Based on Portuguese practice, he proposed larger rations of maize meal, alternated with beans and elephant or hippopotamus meat and dried fish. Meanwhile, the Portuguese provided sleeping mats; The French fed slaves twice a day, at 10: 100 and 5: pm with some snacks of manioc meal, corn, and tobacco in between; The Dutch fed their slaves three times. In Thornton’s opinion, “this complex process of shifting people from Africa to the Americas was full of horrors and might well last several months, during which most slaves would witness the maximum in human degradation, while suffering it themselves.” Then he concludes that the impact of the entire process “as a major first step in deculturation or in the creation of a highly dependent personality are evident.” Although Thornton narratives the living conditions of African slaves, he doesn’t explain their experiences from the perspective of African slaves.

Unlike Thornton, Marcus Rediker pays more attention to the slave ship. He argues that it was “a strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory.” Then he advocates four dramas should be emphasized, if historians want to understand the history of African slaves in the 17th and 18th Atlantic world. According to him, the first drama centered on the relations between the slave-ship captain and his crew, the second on the relationships between sailors and slaves, the third grew from conflict and cooperation among the enslaved themselves, and the fourth emerged from civil society in Britain and America as abolitionists drew one horrifying portrait after another of the Middle Passage for a metropolitan reading public. Like Thornton, Rediker discusses the horror and violence of African slaves, but he attempts to understand the history of African slaves by combing captains, sailors and slaves together. In Thornton’s book, African slaves were passively oppressed and exploited. While in Rediker’s book, there is no core narrative. Instead, connecting captains, sailors and slaves together, he provides us three overlapped narratives, which tells us different experiences and narratives when they were on the slave ships.

Thornton believes that the history of African slaves should be understood from the perspective of nation and empire and its overseas expansion. However, Rediker advocates an Atlantic perspective, because he assumes that it could beyond the boundaries of nation and empire. In Rediker’s book, sailors, captains and slaves were the actors, and nobody was superior or inferior to others. Meanwhile, nobody was passive or positive. For Rediker, “the slave ship was a linchpin of a rapidly growing Atlantic system of capital and labor. It linked workers free, unfree, and everywhere in between, in capitalist and noncapitalist societies on several continents.” Following the historical turn of history from below and focusing on slave trip and the complicated relationships between captains, sailors and slaves, Rediker makes their histories more vivid.