Shipboard insurrections

Abstract

Abstract Historian Marcus Rediker writes that the transatlantic slave trade lasted almost four centuries (from the late 15th to the late 19th century) and that its golden age or peak was 1700–1808 when two‐thirds of the captives – 40 percent or 3 million – were transported in British and American ships (2005: 5). During the course of the trade (or the loading and transporting of 12.4 million African captives onto ships for a horrific “Middle Passage” to hundreds of destinations) 1.8 million died, but who were these human captives and where were they shipped to? Between1707–1808 the British and Americans sent ships to these regions of Africa: Senegambia, Sierra Leone/the Windward Coast, the Gold Coast, the Bights of Benin and Biafra, and West Central Africa (Kongo, Angola). The African captives' primary destinations were the British Sugar Islands (“where more than 70 percent of all slaves were purchased, almost half of these at Jamaica”) but large numbers also ended up with French and Spanish buyers as a result of a special set of treaties called the Asiento.