Many Middle Passages

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 provide: 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.

Christopher Emma :

Marcus Rediker is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and author of The Slave Ship: A Human History. Cassandra Pybus is Research Professor of History at the University of Sydney, Australia, and author of Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Question for Liberty. Emma Christopher is an Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia, and author of Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargos, 1730-1807.