The Slave Ship: A Human History

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child sexual abuse and death.

1. “Human ‘wastage’ was simply part of the business, something to be calculated into all planning.”

In the Introduction to The Slave Ship, Rediker highlights the dehumanization and commodification at the heart of the transatlantic slave trade. The term “wastage”—used in many industries to describe accidental losses of nonhuman commodities—dehumanized the dead, turning them into an industrial byproduct. Meanwhile, accounting practices treated this loss of life as a cost of doing business. The calculation was a deliberate act, trading lives for profits by dehumanizing African people.

“I offer this study with the greatest reverence for those who suffered almost unthinkable violence, terror, and death, in the firm belief that we must remember that such horrors have always been, and remain, central to the making of global capitalism.”

Rediker establishes his motivation for writing The Slave Trade. The book, he says, seeks to illustrate the dehumanizing violence of the slave trade, showing how this dehumanization created the economic bedrock on which much of Western capitalism was built. The entire system is indebted to the exploitation and violence of the slave trade, though this has been forgotten. Rediker seeks to explain the way in which this past violence is linked to the economic present while offering reverence and respect for the lives that were deliberately taken away.

“He could think of himself as the savior of families as he destroyed them.”

William Snelgrave exemplifies the cognitive dissonance that allowed captains of slave ships—and others who profited from the slave trade—to convince themselves that they were moral actors while ignoring their own immoral actions. Snelgrave deluded himself into believing that he was a savior figure while transporting hundreds of enslaved people from their home countries to a life of brutality and exploitation.