Diego Schibelinski

Sailing a Hidden Atlantic: Slave Ship Crews during the Age of Abolition (1807–1867)

The main objective of my research is to understand who the workers composing the slave ships' crews were. Precisely those that crossed the Atlantic towards Brazilian ports during the last phase of the transatlantic slave trade. Always paying attention to what legal treatment was provided and offered to them during this period of illegality. In other words, from a collective and Atlantic perspective, reconstituting the fate of these crews during the campaign against the Brazilian slave trade, considering the complexity of the different relations established in this specific labor scenario. After all, although undeniably complex, this is a topic that still needs to be explored.

In this way, I'm proposing a re-reading of the classic topic of the transatlantic slave trade through the lens of Social History, specifically from the perspective of Labor History. By conceiving the crews as an object of analysis, I seek to discuss the material and working conditions under which the voyages were made, considering not only the maritime labor process but also the specific hardships of an endeavor whose "cargo" transported were human beings in processes of enslavement. To this end, I'm drawing on the collective efforts and contributions of Global Labor History.

In my research, capitalism is interpreted as "a process of progressing circulation of commodity production and distribution, in which not just labor products but also means of production and labor itself acquire the status of commodities." A circulation process made possible by using the European deep-sea sailing ship – of which the slave ship is a variant.

Because slave-trade sailors were active in expanding and connecting this new system of global proportions but also in producing one of its most valuable commodities: the human labor force, personified in enslaved Africans'. In my analysis, the slave ship is seen as a "physical space, part of the worlds of labor"; a space of work experience and social coexistence for countless historical subjects that experienced processes of exploitation characteristic of modernity and, above all, of the capitalist economic system formation.

Far from presenting a tendency to free and waged labor universalization, capitalism here is as a system where other kinds of labor relations exist in a compatible way with capitalist markets, being deeply necessary for their further development. That is, within the capitalist system, since its genesis, many commodified labor relations co-existed simultaneously and had equal importance.

In this sense, the slave ship seems to be a privileged space for analyzing how the capitalist organizational structure of work produced different regimes of commodification of labor. An example of how, inside a specific commodity chain, a variety of individual and collective hierarchization and oppression of the labor force were produced and employed.