The Slave Ship: A Human History

Rediker makes clear the link between the slave trade and capitalism as an economic system: “[H]orrors have always been, and remain, central to the making of global capitalism” (13). In slavery, Rediker sees the same profit-driven processes of dehumanization taken to their logical extreme. The suffering of the many, he suggests, serves to enrich the few. The common sailors—the proletariat of the ship—were involved in a system of exploitation designed to enrich the capitalists. Even as they abused the enslaved people in the ship’s hold, they were themselves being abused and exploited by the captain and officers—and, remotely, by the ship’s owners. People were taken from Africa, enslaved by Europeans and Americans, and then made to work on plantations producing goods and commodities to be sold on the international market. Through slavery, the plantation owners, merchants, and capitalists found free labor at the expense of others. Rediker cites Walter Rodney, who believed that slavery was “the new, modern economic system in all its horrifying nakedness, capitalism without a loincloth” (339).

Rediker is able to present slavery as a metonym for capitalism—and particularly global capitalism—due to the concurrence of historical events. The transatlantic slave trade began in the 1500s and lasted until the 1800s, the period in which Western capitalism emerged as the dominant economic force on the planet. This emergence was fueled, Rediker suggests, by the free labor brutally extracted from enslaved people. This process of exploitation was not without challenge. Rediker describes the many mutinies and insurrections on the slave ships (carried out by the common sailors and the enslaved, respectively) and likens these to larger-scale challenges to the social order on dry land. The slave ship, Rediker suggests, correlates to the social structure of American and European societies at the time: the division of labor on the ship, for example, reflected “a hierarchy of laboring roles” that mirrored that of capitalist society (57), with the rich on top and the poor beneath. An insurrection by the enslaved captives was a clear challenge to the social order by the most marginalized people on the ship, but a mutiny was an expression of class tension, Rediker argues. On a larger scale, the exploitation of the common sailors erupted into a labor riot in Liverpool in 1857, when sailors took up arms against the wealthy merchants in a scene that Rediker presents like a political revolution. The analogy is apt, as the riot was motivated by simmering class tensions that were caused by the slave trade on a micro scale and the capitalist economic system on a macro scale. The exploitation of common sailors allows Rediker to demonstrate the extent to which traditional critiques of capitalist exploitation—as a means by which the wealthy exploit the poor for profit—can be applied easily to the slave ships and the slave trade as a whole.

By tying together the slave trade and the capitalist economic system in his reader’s mind, Rediker demonstrates how much of the legacy of slavery lingers into the present day, long after abolition. Throughout the book, he describes men like Henry Laurens and James D’Wolf who were directly involved in the slave trade. They profited from the slave trade and, even after abolition, were able to maintain their wealth. They became the patriarchs of wealthy families and political dynasties, while the enslaved people whose labor had been exploited for centuries received nothing in return. The capitalist system endured beyond abolition, Rediker notes, even if slavery itself ended. Rediker hopes that his book can help to show the degree to which slavery’s effects have lingered into the modern day. Rediker does not advocate for any specific policies or reparations, but he urges his audience to work toward “a social movement for justice” (355). His book looks to the past to describe the brutality of the slave trade, hoping that this history can be brought forward into modern critiques of the capitalist system.