Historian Marcus Rediker, co-author of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic will be giving a series of talks in London to promote his new book:

The Slave Ship:  A Human History
The missing link in the chain of American slavery

For more than three centuries slave ships carried millions of people from the coasts of Africa across the Atlantic to the New World. Much is known of the slave trade and the American plantation complex, but little of the ships that made it all possible. In The Slave Ship, award-winning historian Marcus Rediker draws on thirty years of research in maritime archives to create an unprecedented history of these vessels and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. He reconstructs in chilling detail the lives, deaths, and terrors of captains, sailors, and the enslaved aboard a “floating dungeon” trailed by sharks. From the young African kidnapped from his village and sold to the slaver by a neighboring tribe; to the would-be priest who takes a job as a sailor on a slave ship only to be horrified by the evil he sees; to the captain who relishes having “a hell of my own,” Rediker illuminates the lives of people who were thought to have left no trace.

This is a tale of tragedy and terror, but also an epic of resilience, survival, and the creation of something entirely new, something that could only be called African-American. Marcus Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, as a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern capitalism was made.

New York Times review: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/books/review/Hochschild-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bu&oref=slogin

Monday, November 5, 6:00 pm (London)
NAKED PUNCH REVIEW, BIRKBECK INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES/BIRKBECK SCHOOL OF LAW, BIRKBECK COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
Room B-04, Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Contact: Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Tel: 07986 844969
 o.guardiola-rivera@bbk.ac.uk

Tuesday, November 6, 5:30 pm (London)
LONDON SOCIALIST HISTORIANS GROUP
RAPHAEL SAMUEL HISTORY CENTRE, UNIVERSITY OF EAST LONDON
INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH
Pollard Room (first floor), Senate House
Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Contacts:
John Marriott, Tel.: 07988 709636
 j.w.marriott@uel.ac.uk
Keith Flett, Tel: 07803 167266
 keith.flett@bt.com

Wednesday, November 7, 6:30 pm (London)
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM
Centre for Imperial and Maritime Studies, Leopold Muller Lecture Theatre, National Maritime Museum
Greenwich, London SE10 9NF
(Reservation advised)
Contact: Janet Norton
Tel: 020 8312 6716
 jnorton@nmm.ac.uk