This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market.

Smallwood's story is animated by deep research and gives us a startlingly graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. Ultimately, Saltwater Slavery details how African people were transformed into Atlantic commodities in the process. She begins her narrative on the shores of seventeenth-century Africa, tracing how the trade in human bodies came to define the life of the Gold Coast. Smallwood takes us into the ports and stone fortresses where African captives were held and prepared, and then through the Middle Passage itself. In extraordinary detail, we witness these men and women cramped in the holds of ships, gasping for air, and trying to make sense of an unfamiliar sea and an unimaginable destination. Arriving in America, we see how these new migrants enter the market for laboring bodies, and struggle to reconstruct their social identities in the New World.

Throughout, Smallwood examines how the people at the center of her story-merchant capitalists, sailors, and slaves-made sense of the bloody process in which they were joined. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.

• We started tracking this book on July 11, 2014.
• This book was $9.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 85 times in the past 4,272 days.
• The current price of this book is $9.99 last checked 3 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past year.
• The lowest price to date was $4.99 last reached on November 28, 2015.
• This book has been $4.99 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $19.95 last reached on February 20, 2026.
• This book has been $19.95 16 times since we started tracking it.

• HistoryAfricaWest Africa
• HistoryUnited StatesColonial Period

• Publication Date: December 15, 2008
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 288 Pages
• File Size: 20 KB