Reviews
"One of the greatest strengths of Diptee's account is the effort she makes to reveal the particular experiences and perspectives of women, and especially children. She thus makes a significant contribution to the recent scholarly effort to illuminate the full range of experiences of the enslaved. Diptee's worthy account does much to expand our understanding of the trade that connected West African and Jamaica in the late eighteenth century and the people whose lives were forcibly transformed by it."
--International Journal of Maritime History
"Offers a new demographic assessment of the slave trade and participates in continued debates within the historiography while attempting to understanding the perspectives of the enslaved men, women, and children themselves. To counter the limits of quantitative analysis, Diptee mines sources such as slave narratives, travelogues by traders, and planters' papers for a sense of the enslavement experience. She follows the trajectory of the enslaved from their point of capture, often far from the coast, and eventual shipment from various ports to their new lives in Jamaica. By examining captives' experiences from both sides of the Atlantic, Diptee illuminates the varied dynamics that brought men, women, and children into the transatlantic slave trade and ultimately created a slave society in Jamaica. Her discussion of children's experiences in the trade is especially welcome, as youths remain an understudied group. While understanding fully the 'lives lived and lives lost' in the transatlantic slave trade may not be possible, Diptee's focused and comprehensive view of the final years of trade to Jamaica brings us one step closer."
--Southern Historian, XXXIII
"Makes daring claims about longstanding historiographical debates with some intriguing contentions." … "With the kinds of detailed statistical information about the nature of the slave trade provided by this book . . . , scholars should begin to be able to make significant comparisons about the nature of slave societies throughout the Americas."
--CHOICE