“Masterly.”—Adam Hochschild, The New York Times Book Review In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British and American slave ships of the eighteenth century. Drawing on thirty years of research in maritime archives, court records, diaries, and firsthand accounts, The Slave Ship is riveting and sobering in its revelations, reconstructing in chilling detail a world nearly lost to history: the "floating dungeons" at the forefront of the birth of African American culture.

The Slave Ship: A Human History

History

Rediker, Marcus

Africa

Penguin??Books

A unique account of the most successful slave rebellion in American history, now updated with a new epilogue—from the award-winning author of The Slave Ship In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the Amistad rebellion for its true proponents: the enslaved Africans who risked death to stake a claim for freedom. Using newly discovered evidence and featuring vividly drawn portraits of the rebels, their captors, and their abolitionist allies, Rediker reframes the story to show how a small group of courageous men fought and won an epic battle against Spanish and American slaveholders and their governments. The successful Amistad rebellion changed the very nature of the struggle against slavery. As a handful of self-emancipated Africans steered their own course for freedom, they opened a way for millions to follow. This edition includes a new epilogue about the author's trip to Sierra Leona to search for Lomboko, the slave-trading factory where the Amistad Africans were incarcerated, and other relics and connections to the Amistad rebellion, especially living local memory of the uprising and the people who made it.

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom

Americas

Penguin Publishing Group

This groundbreaking book presents a global perspective on the history of forced migration over three centuries and illuminates the centrality of these vast movements of people in the making of the modern world. Highly original essays from renowned international scholars trace the history of slaves, indentured servants, transported convicts, bonded soldiers, trafficked women, and coolie and Kanaka labor across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. They depict the cruelty of the captivity, torture, terror, and death involved in the shipping of human cargo over the waterways of the world, which continues unabated to this day. At the same time, these essays highlight the forms of resistance and cultural creativity that have emerged from this violent history. Together, the essays accomplish what no single author could provide: a truly global context for understanding the experience of men, women, and children forced into the violent and alienating experience of bonded labor in a strange new world. This pioneering volume also begins to chart a new role of the sea as a key site where history is made.

Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Volume 5)

Christopher, Emma

PYBUS, Cassandra

University of California Press

During global capitalism's long ascent from 1600–1850, workers of all kinds—slaves, indentured servants, convicts, domestic workers, soldiers, and sailors—repeatedly ran away from their masters and bosses, with profound effects. A Global History of Runaways, edited by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum, compares and connects runaways in the British, Danish, Dutch, French, Mughal, Portuguese, and American empires. Together these essays show how capitalism required vast numbers of mobile workers who would build the foundations of a new economic order. At the same time, these laborers challenged that order—from the undermining of Danish colonization in the seventeenth century to the igniting of civil war in the United States in the nineteenth.

A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600–1850 (California World History Library) (Volume 28)

Business & Money

Rossum, Matthias van

Chakraborty, Titas

Economics

The common seaman and the pirate in the age of sail are romantic historical figures who occupy a special place in the popular culture of the modern age. And yet in many ways, these daring men remain little known to us. Like most other poor working people of the past, they left few first-hand accounts of their lives. But their lives are not beyond recovery. In this book, Marcus Rediker uses a huge array of historical sources (court records, diaries, travel accounts, and many others) to reconstruct the social cultural world of the Anglo-American seamen and pirates who sailed the seas in the first half of the eighteenth century. Rediker tours the sailor's North Atlantic, following seamen and their ships along the pulsing routes of trade and into rowdy port towns. He recreates life along the waterfront, where seafaring men from around the world crowded into the sailortown and its brothels, alehouses, street brawls, and city jail. His study explores the natural terror that inevitably shaped the existence of those who plied the forbidding oceans of the globe in small, brittle wooden vessels. It also treats the man-made terror--the harsh discipline, brutal floggings, and grisly hangings--that was a central fact of life at sea. Rediker surveys the commonplaces of the maritime world: the monotonous rounds of daily labor, the negotiations of wage contracts, and the bawdy singing, dancing, and tale telling that were a part of every voyage. He also analyzes the dramatic moments of the sailor's existence, as Jack Tar battled wind and water during a slashing storm, as he stood by his "brother tars" in a mutiny or a stike, and as he risked his neck by joining a band of outlaws beneath the Jolly Roger, the notorious pirate flag. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea focuses upon the seaman's experience in order to illuminate larger historical issues such as the rise of capitalism, the genesis the free wage labor, and the growth of an international working class. These epic themes were intimately bound up with everyday hopes and fears of the common seamen.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750

Cambridge University Press

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700 - 1750

Seamen, captains and pirates occupy a special place in our popular culture, yet until now the historical record of their lives has been remarkably neglected. This brilliant account of the maritime world of the eighteenth-century reconstructs in detail the social and cultural milieu of Anglo-American seafaring and piracy. Rediker follows sailors and their ships along the pulsing trade routes, into ports with their crowded waterfront society of brothels, alehouses, brawls and jails, and paints a compelling picture of their world at sea with its brutal labour, harsh discipline, hangings and floggings. The book's focus on maritime experience illuminates the broader historical sweep of the rise of capitalism and the growth of an international working class - epic themes which were intimately bound up with everyday lives of seafaring men.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Canto original series)

A definitive, sweeping account of the Underground Railroad's long-overlooked maritime origins, from a pre-eminent scholar of Atlantic history and the award-winning author of The Slave Ship As many as 100,000 enslaved people fled successfully from the horrors of bondage in the antebellum South, finding safe harbor along a network of passageways across North America now known as the Underground Railroad. Yet imagery of fugitives ushered clandestinely from safe house to safe house fails to capture the full breadth of these harrowing journeys: many escapes took place not by land but by sea. Deeply researched and grippingly told, Freedom Ship offers a groundbreaking new look into the secret world of stowaways and the vessels that carried them to freedom across the North and into Canada. Sprawling through the intricate riverways of the Carolinas to the banks of the Chesapeake Bay to Boston's harbors, these tales illuminate the little-known stories of freedom seekers who turned their sights to the sea--among them the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass and&nbsp;Harriet Tubman, one of the Underground Railroad's most famous architects. Marcus Rediker, one of the leading scholars of maritime history, puts his command of archival research on full display in this luminous portrait of the Atlantic waterfront as a place of conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation. Freedom Ship is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the complete story of one of North America's most significant historical moments.

Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea

VIKING

Draws on three decades of research to chart the history of slave ships, their crews, and their enslaved passengers, documenting such stories as those of a young kidnapped African whose slavery is witnessed firsthand by a horrified priest from a neighboring tribe responsible for the slave's capture. 30,000 first printing.

Viking Adult

On June 28, 1839, the Spanish slave schooner Amistad set sail from Havana on a routine delivery of human cargo. On a moonless night, after four days at sea, the captive Africans rose up, killed the captain, and seized control of the ship. They attempted to sail to a safe port, but were captured by the U.S. Navy and thrown into jail in Connecticut. Their legal battle for freedom eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where their cause was argued by former president John Quincy Adams. In a landmark ruling, they were freed and eventually returned to Africa. The rebellion became one of the best-known events in the history of American slavery, celebrated as a triumph of the legal system in films and books, all reflecting the elite perspective of the judges, politicians, and abolitionists involved in the case. In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the rebellion for its true proponents: the African rebels who risked death to stake a claim for freedom.
Using newly discovered evidence, Rediker reframes the story to show how a small group of courageous men fought and won an epic battle against Spanish and American slaveholders and their governments. He reaches back to Africa to find the rebels’ roots, narrates their cataclysmic transatlantic journey, and unfolds a prison story of great drama and emotion. Featuring vividly drawn portraits of the Africans, their captors, and their abolitionist allies, he shows how the rebels captured the popular imagination and helped to inspire and build a movement that was part of a grand global struggle between slavery and freedom. The actions aboard the Amistad that July night and in the days and months that followed were pivotal events in American and Atlantic history, but not for the reasons we have always thought.
The successful Amistad rebellion changed the very nature of the struggle against slavery. As a handful of self-emancipated Africans steered their own course to freedom, they opened a way for millions to follow. This stunning book honors their achievement.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rediker, Marcus. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Rediker, Marcus

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rediker, Marcus. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Slave Ship: A Human History

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom

Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Volume 5)

A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600–1850 (California World History Library) (Volume 28)

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700 - 1750

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Canto original series)

Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea

The Slave Ship: A Human History

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom