The expression Middle Passage usually refers to the maritime phase of the slaves’ voyages from Africa to the Americas – the time in between their capture and their sale. Most histories of the Atlantic trade employ the phrase to designate chapters devoted to the conditions endured below the decks of the slave ships at sea. The passage is usually presented as the most traumatic moment of the entire slave trade. For many diasporic Africans it has assumed even iconographic significance. Historians base their accounts of the passage on a variety of sources. A famous abolitionist diagram showed bodies crowded shoulder-to-shoulder and front-to-back, so close together on the slave deck that they could not move. A number of captains left accounts sympathetically revealing what the slaves endured. However, only a very few slaves learned to write or told their stories to literate sponsors who preserved the narratives of their experiences.

Olaudah Equiano’s book is one of the few sources produced by slaves themselves. In his ‘Interesting narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African: written by himself’, published in 1789, he famously described the horrors of the Middle Passage:

Unlike many other slaves, Equiano not only survived the Middle Passage but, in the course of an adventurous life, he became a literate and lettered Afro-Briton and an important supporter of the abolitionist movement. Equiano’s account described violence, suffering, and death on the lower deck of the slaver, but also new means of communication among the slaves, and forms of resistance, such as hunger strikes, leaps overboard, and insurrection.

There have already been some efforts to place the transatlantic slave trade within the framework of other migrations. The book at hand goes a step further. The editors argue that the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade ‘has relevance to a range of migrations involving the coerced movement of people, sometimes simultaneously with the slave trade, as part of a worldwide process of capitalist development that spanned centuries and continues to this day’ (p. 2). Thus they propose a broad theoretical approach in which the passage forms ‘the structuring link between expropriation in one geographic setting and exploitation in another’ (ibid). In essence, the book succeeds in re-evaluating the concept of the Middle Passage and offers a useful and often highly interesting set of examples for the transportation of unfree people in the post-1900 period. The volume is less convincing in its attempt to provide explanations for the transformations in systems of coerced migrations until recent times. With a few exceptions, the aspect of continuity over time remains rather vague.

The eleven articles of the volume cover a wide range of regions and historical contexts and usually make impressive use of the existing evidence. For instance, Edward Alpers discusses the African slave trade in the Indian Ocean and argues that, like Africans transported across the Atlantic, those who arrived at their Indian Ocean destination underwent a process of personal survival and cultural adjustment associated with the diaspora. Nigel Penn uses a well-known source, Peter Kolb’s 1719 account of the Cape settlement, in order to provide an assessment of the migration of mostly illiterate Germans as bonded soldiers to the East Indies and the Cape of Good Hope on Dutch East India Company vessels. Clare Anderson focuses on first-person accounts of mutiny by Indian convicts on the ships of the East Indian Company in the first half of the nineteenth century. She shows that the experiences of the convicts during their passage were multifaceted and diverse, as management, confinement, and provisioning on board transportation vessels varied considerably. Shipboard resistance and revolts revealed not only the extent and limitations of shipboard authority structures but also divisions and hierarchies among convicts. Through the example of the Melanesian labour trade, Laurence Brown discusses ‘subaltern mobility’ and the uncertainties of colonial attempts to control migrant labour. According to him, the most significant force in reshaping the labour trade in the western Pacific during the nineteenth century was not imperial regulation, colonial competition, or the crisis of the global economy but rather the negotiation and resistance of the migrants themselves.

In her contribution, Julia Martinez takes a long-term view of the clandestine trade in Asian women and children for sexual slavery. She points out that, while it is clear that changing technologies have radically altered (and fastened) the means of transport, the hardship and cruelty endured is now mainly determined by the traders’ need to hide their human cargo from the increasing vigilance of immigration authorities. When Martinez notes that ‘a woman’s journey might begin with some degree of consent and end in slavery’ (p. 217), she also nicely captures one of the underlying themes of the volume: the ambivalent relationship between coercion and freedom. The editors probably should have addressed this issue in a more systematic way, as a number of recent studies have questioned the usefulness of categories such as ‘freedom’ and ‘unfreedom’ as analytical tools in order to understand the global history of labour and migration.