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Kari J. Winter, Sowande’ M. Mustakeem. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 188–189, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.188
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In Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999), which fueled the current anti–human-trafficking movement, Kevin Bales suggested that slavery today is harsher than slavery in the past because today’s slaves are so cheap that they are considered disposable, whereas in previous eras slaveholders viewed slaves as valuable property that needed to be maintained (15). Although Sowande’ M. Mustakeem does not mention Bales, in Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage she offers solid refutation of this claim, packing virtually every page with examples of the horrific violence of the transatlantic slave trade. Death, destruction, and “disposal” were ubiquitous.
Mustakeem documents the trade’s violence through extensive quotations from eighteenth-century primary sources written primarily by white British participants: diaries, letters, ship logs, manifests, cargo receipts, newspapers, published narratives, and “the curiously underutilized volume of testimonies given before the British House of Commons during the closing decade of the eighteenth century by a broad range of slave trade actors” (12). Aside from making two brief citations of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Mustakeem largely ignores the extant texts in which enslaved Africans described their own experiences (e.g., Olaudah Equiano, Venture Smith, and Jeffrey Brace).
