Estimates vary, but during the 18th century alone, some six million people were enslaved in Africa and transported across the Atlantic to work on the plantations of the New World. From such seminal histories as Thomas's The Slave Trade or fine fiction such as Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, this great blight is well known. By giving us a detailed account of several slave ships and their masters, passengers and crew, Rediker aims to personalise a horrible abstraction.

He succeeds, on the whole. In the autobiography of one Olaudah Equiano, written in 1789, we have only one first-hand narrative of what it was like to be captured and shipped to doom. Rediker draws on that tract of the abolitionist movement. From thorough research, he adds more. Both enslaving and enslaved, this is a litany of many lives. A few got (very) rich, but most were ruined. Rediker is especially good at recreating the miserable lot of ordinary seamen, whose life expectancy was usually not much greater than that of the wretches in their charge.

One wants context. What did slave-trading Christian gentlemen, like the otherwise philanthropic MP and Governor of the Bank of England, Humphry Morice, believe? Rediker is also light on the reasons for the trade - profit and greed - and on the economics of it and its sordid ships. He cautions that if he has done “any justice to the subject”, this will be “a painful book to read”. Even with its faults of omission, so it proves.

The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker
John Murray, £9.99 Buy the book here

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