![]() ![]() ![]() Mustakeem relies heavily on her primary sources, and at times she fails to analyze historical anecdotes sufficiently to support her broader claims. Throughout, she works to make visible the shipboard presence of women, children, the elderly, the ill, and the disabled, revealing the effects of age, gender, health, and ability on slavery’s economic and social development. Tracing patterns of dehumanization, physical and psychological torture, and enforced dependency that captured Africans faced aboard ships, Mustakeem argues that the Middle Passage experience fundamentally shaped slavery as a global institution. The Middle Passage was not just a traumatic mass event, she demonstrates, but a complex “manufacturing process” by which slavers “unmade” human bodies into commodities. Countering the quantitative focus of recent slave voyage histories, she uses diaries, ships’ logs, legal testimonies, and other archival materials to map relationships among slaves, sailors, and shipboard doctors. Louis, investigates how slave ships functioned as social spaces in this detail-laden account of the 18th-century transatlantic slave trade. ![]() ![]() Mustakeem, a professor of history and African and African-American studies at Washington University in St. ![]()
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