Murder on the Middle Passage

Reviews / Votes

This was the cold and callous pragmatism that informed so much of British imperial policy; there was no room for sentiment here, and this is the world that Rogers exposes in recounting the death of a teenage girl. It is this history - and not the triumphalist accounts of abolition and later emancipation - that we must heed; it is this history that reveals the darker, shameful, but essential truths of our imperial past. * GUARDIAN * In this absorbing book, distinguished social historian Nicholas Rogers uses the 1792 trial
of Captain John Kimber for the murder of a young woman on board Recovery [...] Rogers honors this thoughtful, respectful refusal to project his own politics onto victims of slavery who are silent in the archive, instead building a world around the murder case while drawing attention to the silence at its center. * JOURNAL OF MODERN HISTORY * Roger's well-written forensic account of a notorious murder on a slave ship is much more than a case study. It is an important revelation about the very nature of slave trading and the first flush of British abolition. Here is a micro-history exposing the wider realities of Atlantic slavery. JAMES WALVIN is Professor emeritus of History at the University of York and author and editor of over thirty books including Freedom: The Overthrowing of the Slave Empires, Sugar: The World Corrupted, from Slavery to Obesity and Slavery in Small Things: Slavery and Modern Cultural Habits. * . * This work will benefit the field for years to come. . . . This microhistory allows readers a deeper understanding of not only the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, but further of how a ship's crew was held to ship's standards even within the perimeter of a port city. By doing so, Rogers demonstrates a glimpse into the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. -- Jane Plummer * The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord *