Stephanie E. Smallwood’s “Turning African Captives into Atlantic Commodities,” details the dehumanizing processes used by European slave traders to strip away the social and physical bonds that anchored enslaved Africans to their own communities. By honing in on commodification within the context of the Atlantic slave trade, the chapter reveals the ways in which innocent African people were taken from their home settings and turned into something that wasn’t quite a person, yet still human. Published in 2007 using standard Chicago Manual of Style, Smallwood writes with very little personal tone injected into the writing, using specific pieces of evidence gathered from old texts to tell the stories of various coastal settlements used to house slaves before they were shipped across the Atlantic. The chapter is very clearly directed towards a well-educated and interested audience, as it is dense with factual recounts of rationing problems, slave uprisings, disease laden slave forts, and the Royal African Company’s overall history of “both physical and social violence” that was needed in order to convert a captive into a marketable good. Beginning the third page of the chapter with “Turning people into slaves entailed more than the completion of a market transaction,” Smallwood follows through…show more content… Different slave holding facilities along the western coast of Africa, such as “Cape Coast Castle,” serve as the settings for the accounts of human commodification detailed within the chapter. Beyond just the slave forts however, Smallwood emphasizes the importance placed on removing a captured slave from their home community in order to turn their entire being into a product that can be sold and shipped across the Atlantic to other parts of the
