Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses slavery and abuse. This guide uses the word “slave” in quotation only.

From the beginning of the text, Smallwood discusses the various rising powers in the Gold Coast using enslaved people as a possible form of income, either used to obtain European goods or enact physical and reproductive labor. Smallwood uses the abusive and violent details of slavery to convey that this commodification process led to enslavers dehumanizing enslaved people. Instead of viewing them in subjective or emotional terms, enslavers viewed them in quantifiable terms like profit and loss.

Smallwood uses the official business records of the Royal African Company to show that enslaved people were reduced to numbers and statistics. Through the records, she demonstrates how enslavers obtained and incarcerated African people, and how these incarcerated people subsisted on the bare minimum of food and space so the Royal African Company could profit. She highlights how the company disregarded comfort, health, pleasure, and other humanizing factors, and instead treated people as though they were inanimate objects. She therefore suggests that commodifying people is dehumanizing and that dehumanization enabled enslavers and traders to continue their endeavors without moral conscience.