Many Middle Passages

This ground-breaking book presents a global perspective on the history of forced migration over three centuries, in order to illuminate 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, coolie and Kanaka labor across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans. They depict the captivity, cruelty, 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 for the sea as a key site where history is made.