The Middle Passage

About This Book

For more than four centuries, from the 1440s to the 1860s, roughly twelve and a half million African men, women, and children were carried across the Atlantic in the holds of ships — the largest forced migration in human history. About one in seven died at sea. The survivors built the wealth of the Atlantic world with their bodies, and built new cultures with their spirit.

In this single sweeping volume, E.B Cohen tells the whole human story — and explains, from first principles, how it all worked: how the sugar plantation was invented on a few Atlantic islands and then remade the world; how the triangular trade actually functioned; how a captive was taken in the African interior and marched to a coastal castle; how a slave ship was financed, insured, and packed; what the Middle Passage did to a human body and mind; how chattel law invented race itself; how the enslaved resisted from the ship's hold to the cane field to the battlefields of Haiti; and how — through the first great human-rights movement and through the enslaved themselves — the whole system was finally pulled down.

Even-handed about European demand and African supply, unflinching about the horror yet centered always on the humanity, the resistance, and the survival of the enslaved, this is the complete, accessible history of the trade that made the modern Atlantic world — and of the twelve million who endured it.