Cassandra Pybus & Marcus Rediker 
Many Middle Passages 
Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World

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.

Table of Content

List of Maps

Introduction

Marcus Rediker, Cassandra Pybus, and Emma Christopher


1. The Other Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean

Edward A. Alpers

2. The East African Middle Passage: David Livingstone, the Zambesi Expedition, and Lake Nyassa, 1858–1866

Iain Mc Calman

3. The Iranun and Balangingi Slaving Voyage: Middle Passages in the Sulu Zone

James Warren

4. The Voyage Out: Peter Kolb and VOC Voyages to the Cape

Nigel Penn

5. Bound for Botany Bay: John Martin’s Voyage to Australia

Cassandra Pybus

6. ‘The Slave Trade Is Merciful Compared to [This]’: Slave Traders, Convict Transportation, and the Abolitionists

Emma Christopher

7. Convict Passages in the Indian Ocean, c. 1790–1860

Clare Anderson

8. After Slavery: Forced Drafts of Irish and Chinese Labor in the American Civil War, or the Search for Liquid Labor

Scott Reynolds Nelson

9. La Trata Amarilla: The ‘Yellow Trade’ and the Middle Passage, 1847–1884

Evelyn Hu-De Hart

10. ‘A Most Irregular Traffic’: The Oceanic Passages of the Melanesian Labor Trade

Laurence Brown

11. 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

Index

About the author

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.