Many Middle Passages the california world history library Edited by Edmund Burke III, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Patricia Seed . The Unending Frontier: Environmental History of the Early Modern World, by John F. Richards . Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, by David Christian . The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, by Engseng Ho . Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, –, by Thomas R. Metcalf . Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker Many Middle Passages forced migration and the making of the modern world Edited by Emma Christopher Cassandra Pybus Marcus Rediker university of california press berkeley los angeles london Royalties from the sale of this book go to Free the Slaves, a nonprofit organization working to end slavery worldwide. Visit http://freetheslaves.net. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Many middle passages : forced migration and the making of the modern world / edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, Marcus Rediker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn: ---- (cloth : alk. paper) isbn: ---- (pbk. : alk. paper) . Slave trade — Africa—History. Slaves. Slavery. I. Christopher, Emma, –. II. Pybus, Cassandra. III. Rediker, Marcus Buford. ht.m .' — dc Manufactured in the United States of America This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook , a recycled fiber of which is de-inked postconsumer waste, processed chlorine free. EcoBook is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/ASTM D– (Permanence of Paper). The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation. contents acknowledgments / ix introduction / Marcus Rediker, Cassandra Pybus, and Emma Christopher / the other middle passage: the african slave trade in the indian ocean / Edward A. Alpers / the east african middle passage: david livingstone, the zambesi expedition, and lake nyassa, – / Iain McCalman / the iranun and balangingi slaving voyage: middle passages in the sulu zone / James Warren / the voyage out: peter kolb and voc voyages to the cape / Nigel Penn / bound for botany bay: john martin’s voyage to australia / Cassandra Pybus / “the slave trade is merciful compared to [this]”: slave traders, convict transportation, and the abolitionists / Emma Christopher / convict passages in the indian ocean, c. – / Clare Anderson / after slavery: forced drafts of irish and chinese labor in the american civil war, or the search for liquid labor / Scott Reynolds Nelson / LA TRATA AMARILLA: the “yellow trade” and the middle passage, – / Evelyn Hu-DeHart / “a most irregular traffic”: the oceanic passages of the melanesian labor trade / Laurence Brown / LA TRAITE DES JAUNES: trafficking in women and children across the china sea / Julia Martínez afterword: “all of it is now” / Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd postscript: GUN- SLAVE CYCLE / Marcus Rediker appendix / contributors / index / acknowledgments the themes of this book were initially debated at conferences and collo- quia, where numerous scholars contributed to our ideas. For their various contributions we thank Alan Atkinson, Gopalan Balachandran, Susan Bal- lyn, Robert Blyth, David Cannadine, Linda Colley, Maryse Condé, Eliza- beth DeLoughrey, Greg Dening, Ian Duffield, Clare Corbould, Jan Ewald, Dave Featherstone, Judith Jackson Fossett, Lucy Frost, Michael Graham- Stewart, Cindy Hahamovich, Douglas Hamilton, Saidiya Hartman, Wythe Holt Jr., Peter Hulme, Jonathan Hyslop, Grace Karskens, Bernhard Klein, Michael McCarthy, Larry McDonnell, Bruce McLeod, Kenneth Morgan, Lisa Norling, Ruan O’Donnell, Henry Reynolds, Dave Rollison, Anja Schwarz, Robert Sweeny, Katerina Teaiwa, Françoise Verges, Richard Water- house, Peter Way, Jane Webster, Michael West, Terri-ann White, Sara Wood, and Nigel Worden. Many of these people attended a conference in July entitled Middle Passages: The Oceanic Voyage as Social Process, which was jointly sponsored by the International Centre for Convict Studies at the Uni- versity of Tasmania and the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia. We would also like to express our gratitude to Graeme Henderson and the staff at the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Fremantle for a beautiful venue and a warm welcome. Special thanks go to the Australian Research Council for a large three-year grant to Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart for a project on unfree migration, ix which was in many ways a catalyst for this book. Colleagues at Pittsburgh, Sydney, and Monash universities have provided all kinds of support and encouragement for which we are very grateful. We would especially like to thank James Bradley, who did the painstak- ing work of putting the manuscript into a consistent and coherent form, and Lauren Smelcher, who helped with the proofreading. Our editor at Uni- versity of California Press, Niels Hooper, and his assistant, Rachel Lock- man, have supported this project from the beginning, and we cannot thank them enough. x acknowledgments Introduction marcus rediker, cassandra pybus, and emma christopher the “middle passage” is an old maritime phrase, dating to the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade. It designated the bottom line of a trading triangle, between the “outward passage” from Europe to Africa and the “homeward passage” from the Americas back to Europe. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the first maritime usage as , by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. The phrase is older than that, but by crediting Clarkson another truth is revealed: through a broad-based social movement, those who campaigned to abolish the slave trade made the middle passage notorious and a part of pop- ular vocabulary in their own time and thereafter. Drawing upon and publi- cizing the gruesome social conditions and the fierce resistance by enslaved Africans aboard the slave ships, the abolitionists managed to focus attention on a reality far beyond the shores of most people’s experience and to make real the horrors of the middle passage to a metropolitan reading public. This was in itself a great achievement, not least because most people in the eighteenth century, like most people today, tended to regard as real only the land—and national—spaces of the earth’s surface. The oceans were vast, ahistorical voids. Of course, maritime exploration and discovery showed that history happened on the oceans, as did the naval battles that determined the course of history. But explorers and admirals were incor- porated into top-down, national, and “terra-centric” narratives, even when the seaborne agents who made the discoveries and battles possible were a motley crew of sailors who eluded national definition.1 Because the aboli- tionist campaign demonstrated that history happened on the high seas, many scholars have turned their attention to the middle passage of the African slave trade and have built a significant body of historical literature that transcends the land boundaries of nation-states. This scholarship is the inspiration for our volume. In part, this book has evolved from a cluster of ideas presented in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.2 The first of these ideas is that the rise of capi- talism from the late sixteenth century onward forced millions of expro - priated people to make middle passages from Europe and Africa to the Americas. The second is that the epitome of these middle passages, that of the Atlantic slave trade, might be used to explore other social and cultural transformations that resulted from the transport of people around the globe. The third is that it might be possible to relate the experiences of slaves, indentured servants, transported convicts, and coerced migrants of all kinds. The fourth is that “prisons” of various sorts—from the slave’s barra- coon to the convict’s jail to the sailor’s crimp house—were themselves an instrumental part of various middle passages, even when the laborer was nominally “free.” In all, the middle passage is not merely a maritime phrase to describe one part of an oceanic voyage; it can, rather, be utilized as a con- cept—the structuring link between expropriation in one geographic setting and exploitation in another. Given the current trend toward global histo- ries, it seemed to the editors of this volume that the scholarship on the African slave voyage across the Atlantic had a role to play in speaking to the wider historiography of forced migration, sometimes on land but especially in ocean crossings. In this book we show how the concept of the middle passage has relevance to a range of migrations involving the coerced move- ment of people, sometimes simultaneously with the slave trade, as part of a worldwide process