If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade / Edition 1

by Eric Robert Taylor

Overview

If We Must Die examines nearly five hundred shipboard rebellions that occurred over the course of the entire slave trade, directly challenging the prevailing thesis that such resistance was infrequent or insignificant. As Eric Robert Taylor shows, though most revolts were crushed quickly, others raged on for hours, days, or weeks, and, occasionally, the Africans captured the vessel and returned themselves to freedom. In recounting these rebellions, Taylor suggests that certain factors like geographic location, the involvement of women and children, and the timing of a shipboard revolt, determined the difference between success and failure. Taylor also explores issues like aid from other ships, punishment of slave rebels, and treatment of sailors captured by the Africans. If We Must Die expands the historical view of slave resistance, revealing a continuum of rebellions that spanned the Atlantic as well as the centuries. These uprisings, Taylor argues, ultimately helped limit and end the traffic in enslaved Africans and also served as crucial predecessors to the many revolts that occurred subsequently on plantations throughout the Americas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807134429
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2009
Series:	Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	935,670
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eric Robert Taylor, a freelance television producer who lives in Los Angeles, holds a doctorate in history from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Illustrations and Tables xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

1 Enslavement, Detention, and the Middle Passage 15

2 Conditions Favorable for Revolt 41

3 Precautions against Revolt 67

4 Revolt 85

5 Unsuccessful Revolts 104

6 Successful Revolts 119

7 Shipboard Revolts in the Americas: A New Wave 139

Conclusion 164

Appendix: Chronology of Shipboard Slave Revolts, 1509 - 1865 179

Notes 215

Bibliography 241

Index 259