What do you think?
Rate this book
California World History Library
Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World
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 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.
274 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
2 people are currently reading
84 people want to read
About the author
Emma Christopher
5 books7 followersEmma Christoper is the author of "A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa and How it Led to the Settlement of Australia," and "Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1808." She is also the co-editor, with Marcus Rediker and Cassandra Pybus, of "Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World."
Emma gained her PhD from the University College, London in 2002 and now holds an Australian Council Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney.
Emma is currently writing the history of a small west African slave trading factory and also involved in making a documentary about this story. She has traced slaves from the factory to Cuba and Sierra Leone and the slave traders to the USA and Australia. Because of the unique set of documents related to the case it has, remarkably, been possible to find descendants of both groups today and so to reveal some of the global legacy of one small outpost of the transatlantic slave trade. Emma is researching and filming this story in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cuba, the USA and Australia.
Emma lives in Sydney, Austratlia.
Emma gained her PhD from the University College, London in 2002 and now holds an Australian Council Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney.
Emma is currently writing the history of a small west African slave trading factory and also involved in making a documentary about this story. She has traced slaves from the factory to Cuba and Sierra Leone and the slave traders to the USA and Australia. Because of the unique set of documents related to the case it has, remarkably, been possible to find descendants of both groups today and so to reveal some of the global legacy of one small outpost of the transatlantic slave trade. Emma is researching and filming this story in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cuba, the USA and Australia.
Emma lives in Sydney, Austratlia.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 5, 2020
I assign this to graduate students in my Global Migration History course. It is exquisite in how each author engages with "passage" as an analytic, with attendant questions of agency, freedom/coercion, and resistance in forced migrations. Well conceived, cohesively edited, with a great intro that makes this volume a fantastic teaching text.
June 18, 2020
Many Middle Passages is a is a collection of essays by different authors thematically engaging with the idea of the “middle passage”, a concept relating to the three-way Atlantic traffic, in narratives of migration outside its original context. The “middle passage” is an old maritime phrase, dating to the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade, referring to the bottom-line of a trading triangle between the “outward passage” from Europe to Africa and the “homeward passage” from America back to Europe. The editors of the volume (themselves noted historians) put forward the idea of the middle passage as a structuring link between “expropriation in one geographic setting and exploitation in another”, speaking to the wider historiography of forced migration, as part of a worldwide process of capitalist development. Additionally, they consider a variety of “prisons” central to these middle passages, and claim that the history of labour transported across oceans is a “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” of terror, resistance, and cultural creativity.
The book addresses multiple audiences, at multiple levels, on a range of historical movements. The contributors are established scholars from the United States, Australia, Britain and South Africa, and essays introduce readers to: African and Malagasy people taken to the Americas or across the Sahara; Arab slave caravans transiting East Africa en route to Zanzibar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Reunion; Southeast Asian slave raiding networks; German military conscripts shipped to the Cape of Good Hope and Batavia; penal transport to Australia and Southeast Asia; Chinese and Irish contract labourers in the United States during the 1860s; the Chinese coolie trade to Cuba and Peru; the western Pacific “blackbirding” trade; and Chinese trafficking in women and children throughout Southeast Asia.
The narrative thread running through all the essays in the book is a history of captivity, cruelty, torture, terror, and death, which in turn created a history of resistance and, finally, emerging from the two, a history of cultural creativity. The key takeaway, for me, was that these middle passages were not merely voyages over water, but rather transformations experienced on the space of the shipboard over the duration of the sea voyage. The book sits at the crossroads of several ongoing projects, including calls to create a global past, and works that place coerced and free migrations in global perspectives. One of the striking things about the essays in the book is that there is an overt, bold and conscious attempt in their articulations to shift the focus of historical debate from the “top-down, national and “terra-centric” narratives” to the “vast, ahistorical voids” of the oceans. They provide a peek into a sense of the intensity of historical action in seascapes around the world and draw attention to the fact that similar movements continue to happen even today and that there is a need to understand them in context of longer histories of movement and forced migration outside of nation-state bound histories.
The book addresses multiple audiences, at multiple levels, on a range of historical movements. The contributors are established scholars from the United States, Australia, Britain and South Africa, and essays introduce readers to: African and Malagasy people taken to the Americas or across the Sahara; Arab slave caravans transiting East Africa en route to Zanzibar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Reunion; Southeast Asian slave raiding networks; German military conscripts shipped to the Cape of Good Hope and Batavia; penal transport to Australia and Southeast Asia; Chinese and Irish contract labourers in the United States during the 1860s; the Chinese coolie trade to Cuba and Peru; the western Pacific “blackbirding” trade; and Chinese trafficking in women and children throughout Southeast Asia.
The narrative thread running through all the essays in the book is a history of captivity, cruelty, torture, terror, and death, which in turn created a history of resistance and, finally, emerging from the two, a history of cultural creativity. The key takeaway, for me, was that these middle passages were not merely voyages over water, but rather transformations experienced on the space of the shipboard over the duration of the sea voyage. The book sits at the crossroads of several ongoing projects, including calls to create a global past, and works that place coerced and free migrations in global perspectives. One of the striking things about the essays in the book is that there is an overt, bold and conscious attempt in their articulations to shift the focus of historical debate from the “top-down, national and “terra-centric” narratives” to the “vast, ahistorical voids” of the oceans. They provide a peek into a sense of the intensity of historical action in seascapes around the world and draw attention to the fact that similar movements continue to happen even today and that there is a need to understand them in context of longer histories of movement and forced migration outside of nation-state bound histories.
December 11, 2008
This excellent collection of essays more than lives up to its "Product Description." Its scope goes beyond the 3 centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade: it includes essays on slave trade in the South Pacific; forced labor and migration of Chinese, Indian and Irish people, as well as prisoners and sailors; slavery today; and links these histories of forced labor to the unfolding "needs" of global capitalism and the world that has emerged.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews