From your book's description:

not just for adult men, but also for women, children, teens, infants, nursing mothers, the elderly, diseased, ailing, and dying

I am very intrigued by the inclusion of teenagers here, because that's a category that often doesn't get focused attention outside the context of focused books/articles on adolescence. What was specific about the "teenage" experience of the Middle Passage

And a second question, if you don't mind. A topic that comes up sometimes on AskHistorians is the involvement of black Africans and Americans in the slave trade as workers on slave ships--both free and themselves enslaved. What can you say about the tensions in the three-way relationship between slaves being transported, slaves as crew, and free crew (white, and also black crewmembers if there were any)?

Thanks for stopping by!

Hello Dr. Mustakeem, and thanks for doing this AMA! What initially sparked your interest in the Middle Passage, and what led you to the process of doing social history found in ship's logs and other contemporary documents?

And, as a question related to my personal area of interest, what are important collections of logs that you found from slave ships (that is, where are they archived)?

Thanks!

Hi Dr. Mustakeem,

thank you for doing this.

After having briefly perused reviews of your book, one quality reviewers regularly mention is how you are able to describe the "multiplicity of sufferings" of people experiencing the middle passage as slaves. Being only broadly familiar with the history of slave trade, could you elaborate on this point and also describe what you have called the "human manufacturing process" that was the slave trade?

Thank you!

Hello Dr. Mustakeem.

While I haven't read Slavery at Sea yet, I did read your essay Blood Stained Mirrors in Jay & Lyerly's recent book.

While you offer many good suggestions for bringing the history of the slave trade into the classroom, I was wondering what suggestions you have for public historians seeking to integrate it into tours and exhibits? More specifically, given our short amount of time with audiences unlikely to have a solid understanding of the topic, what do you believe are the most vital aspects of the experience that we should seek to convey?

Thank you.

Thanks for doing this, Dr. Mustakeem. Slavery at Sea is a powerful book.

In the book, you write about refuse slaves and the particularly dire fates they might suffer. I've read in Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone that British North America was often the last port of call for slavers to disembark their human cargo, where the local enslavers had to pick from whoever the West Indies didn't want. Obviously some degree of visible impairment would make any enslaved person undesirable to buyers, but that's implied to me that standards on mainland North America were of necessity a bit more permissive than in the Caribbean.

Is it fair to say that the same person, assuming no deterioration in condition between ports, might be a refuse slave on, say, Barbados but a prime or near-prime slave when landed in North America?

Prof. Mustakeem - thank you for agreeing to do this AMA.

My question (coming very literally from a position of ignorance about the Slave trade, having only just read the blurb of your book on the UofIl Press website) is about how slaves were treated and perceived by crew and by those in charge of the ships. Was it a case of 'don't damage the merchandise'? Or was the ideology of 'slave as sub-human' so deeply ingrained that slaves suffered from the same sorts of brutality on ships as they did once they had reached the Americas?

What were relationships between the slavers and the slaves like on board ships?

I had greatly enjoyed the new 'Roots' series that came out last year, and while it can be said for much of the show, the portion showing the crossing from Africa to America was particularly harrowing in its portrayal. While mass media of course will embellish for dramatic effect, if you did watch the show, how realistic do you feel the portrayal was in this regards? Especially how common would attempted uprisings by the slaves be?

Dr Mustakeem, Thank you for offering your time to us humble redditors!

I just wanted to know if research for your book ended up uncovering some new facts about mainland Africa and their views on the people being sent to the Middle Passage.

And another question for you: Typically African studies seem to focus on the slavery aspect of the continent. Do you see the studies in your field perhaps turning to other subjects concerning Africans?

Dr. Mustakeem,

First of all, thanks for doing this.

I'm curious about the frequency of attacks on slave ships. In Engel Sluiter's "New Light on the '20. and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia, August 1619," he cites an account book which casually asserts that the San Juan Bautista was attacked by English corsairs.

Were slave ships an increasingly tempting target as the slave trade matured or was a slave cargo considered no more or less of a prize than any other cargo? And did nations impose the threat of any greater ramifications for piracy (or an attack of any sort) depending on whether the cargo was slaves or otherwise?

Finally, how vastly different would the experience of those slaves be on the English corsair vs. the San Juan Bautista?

Again, thanks for doing this AMA.

Hi Prof. Mustakeem! Thanks for being here.

I've just read Beckert and Rockman's Slavery's Capitalism for class today (I'm a history MA student) and was wondering: what do you think of the rise of the study of capitalism in relation to slavery and how has it influenced (or maybe has not) your work on the slave trade?

I'm also interested to hear what directions you think the field of Atlantic history will be going in in the future, if you have any thoughts on that.

Dr. Mustakeem,

Thank you so much for doing this AMA. I hope you'll forgive me if this is too simplistic. Does your book explore the possibility of creolization occurring during the middle passage? Also, do you know if the memory of the Middle Passage was different for slaves in different locations, i.e. Brazil and the US?

How accurate were contemporary (white) abolitionists in their descriptions and depictions of the slave trade and the middle passage in particular? A few months ago I was at the Met and was incredibly struck by The Slave Ship, and ended up rereading some of Theodore Parker and William Wilberforces speeches, but I recognize that all of these are from the perspective of white Europeans and Americans with no direct experience or familiarity with the trade. How accurate was their understanding?

Where are the archives of primary documents for this field? How did the documents end up where they are?

Are there uncatalogued or understudied archives/caches?

Are there extensive ones in Africa? Where and what are these?

Thank you.

I've got to ask you about your soundtrack for the book, which isn't something I've even heard of happening with an academic work, let alone seen! Where'd you get the idea, and how'd it come about?

I'm a big fan ─ picked up the book after seeing it in my Twitter feed from AAIHS online roundtable.

Hello Professor Mustakeem,

I always wondered, how did crews deal with the enormous demands regarding water supplies? Would slaves often die from dehydration? How would they prevent water from going stale across the Atlantic?

Thank you very much for your time.

Hi there -- for the curious, here's some more information about Dr. Sowande' Mustakeem's book. You can find a link to the book's site from its publisher here. To quote from that:

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 deeply, the book centers how the oceanic transport of human cargoes--infamously known as the 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 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. Mustakeem offers provocative new insights into how gender, health, age, illness, and medical treatment intersected with trauma and violence transformed human beings into the world's most commercially sought commodity for over four centuries.

Hello, it says that someof your research came from personal documents. I was wondering how much of the documents actually came from the former slaves? And if so, what kind of documentation was this?

I assume most of the records were from the traders/owners of the slaves and the ship owners who were transporting there "cargo".

Also, because of this, do you talk about how their culture was carried on with them/ forgotten in various ways?

Hello, Dr. Mustakeem!

I would like to hear your thoughts on the food given to Slaves on the middle passage, if you had details on it. My own studies show that providing decent enough food for the africans on captured slavers was a point of pride to the British against the brazilians. I discussed this topic with Dr. Jaime Rodrigues, who has written on this topic and said to me that his greatest frustration was not finding nearly enough sources from inside the slave ships. You must feel incredibly lucky to have had access to these documentations!