{"id":9943,"date":"2026-03-23T14:31:27","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T14:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/culturalleft.org\/cl\/2026\/03\/23\/freedom-ship-uncovering-the-story-of-escaping-slavery-by-sea-reviews-culture-socialist-worker\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T14:31:27","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T14:31:27","slug":"freedom-ship-uncovering-the-story-of-escaping-slavery-by-sea-reviews-culture-socialist-worker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culturalleft.org\/cl\/2026\/03\/23\/freedom-ship-uncovering-the-story-of-escaping-slavery-by-sea-reviews-culture-socialist-worker\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom Ship: Uncovering the story of escaping slavery by sea Reviews & Culture – Socialist Worker"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Freedom\n

Freedom Ship is a labour \u00adhistory of the waterfront<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Could you say why you decided to write Freedom Ship?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Back in the 1990s, when I was working with Peter Linebaugh on a book entitled The Many-Headed Hydra. I studied advertisements in Southern port-city newspapers in the<\/p>\n

States placed by enslavers in the 18th<\/sup> and 19th<\/sup> century to recover people who had emancipated themselves from bondage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These ads contained a recurrent refrain\u2014all masters of ships are warned not to take this fugitive on board, or you will suffer the full effects of the law.<\/p>\n

It made me realise that a lot of people were escaping slavery by sea and that almost nothing was known about them.<\/p>\n

I came back to the theme in 2020. By that time, important research had been carried out on the subject I decided to add to this burgeoning scholarship. I studied the Atlantic system of escape during the thirty years before the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.<\/p>\n

That maritime circuit turned out to be a long-hidden engine of resistance, one that had great consequences\u2014it accelerated the movement towards Civil War.<\/p>\n

You use the term \u201c\u00adterracentrism\u201d to \u00adcontrast the view of the underground railroad\u2014could you explain further?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I spent years trying to figure out why seafaring people were considered \u201cmarginal\u201d to history. They were central to the single most important theme of early modern history\u2014the global rise of capitalism.<\/p>\n

I finally figured out that a deep, uninspected, and unconscious bias operated in our thought.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most people think that history happens on land, in nation states. The seas, conversely, are ahistorical voids.<\/p>\n

I called this bias terracentrism, a distorting land-based conception of history. I have spent over forty years now trying to show that history happens at sea.<\/p>\n

National, and \u00adnationalist, histories almost always \u00admarginalised s\u00adeafaring workers. I hope my work has shown how people made history at sea and how the sea itself is crucial to understanding the biggest historical themes.<\/p>\n

I discovered that the metaphor \u201cunderground railroad\u201d is misleading, first of all quite literally because fugitives did not escape underground, nor did many of them escape by rail.<\/p>\n

Worse, the metaphor obstructs our vision of the past as much as it illuminates. It makes it harder to think about maritime escape.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A second issue is that rivers, estuaries, canals and the Atlantic Ocean were much more central to commerce than were railroads in the early 19th century. The choice of an industrial metaphor hides the primacy of waterways in the economic lives\u2014and the freedom struggles\u2014of 19th<\/sup> century Americans.<\/p>\n

Could you elaborate on the networks of \u00adworkers on the waterfront?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Freedom Ship is a labour \u00adhistory of the waterfront, where thousands of fugitives found sailors, \u00addockworkers and market women who were willing to help them gain their freedom.<\/p>\n

This broad-based struggle grew out of working relationships on the docks.<\/p>\n

Maritime workers North and South occupied strategic positions in the division of labour that allowed them to get fugitives on board and to get them off and to safety once they arrived at their destination.<\/p>\n

It is crucial that this means of liberation was horizontal, based in class relations.<\/p>\n

Here was a route to freedom made possible by fellow workers.<\/p>\n

It is also significant that most historians have regarded US abolitionism as a middle and upper-class movement.<\/p>\n

It turns out that practical abolitionism, the kind that resulted in radical change and real liberty, originated among the motley crews of the Atlantic port who practiced a little-known transracial solidarity.<\/p>\n

Once a person had reached a Northern port there was still no guarantee of safety. Was it possible to be a freed slave to be arrested and deported to the South?<\/p>\n

The New York merchants who owned the ships coming back from Southern ports were profoundly invested in the system of slavery. They transshipped the cotton and made vast fortunes in the process. They therefore did everything they could to return any fugitive who arrived in New York City to the South.<\/p>\n

Packs of slave-catchers infested the docks and made it dangerous for any escapee to stop there. Another danger was that ship captains would sometimes \u201cblackbird\u201d New York\u2019s free black workers. This was a practice where black workers would be captured, dragged onto ships and sailed southward to be sold into bondage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fortunately, black maritime workers and a radical abolitionist group called the Vigilance Committee, led by the African American former sailor David Ruggles. This patrolled the waterfront to find fugitives and even engaged in street fights to rescue them from the blackbirders.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some fugitives were recaptured and returned to the vicious system of slavery, but many more successfully escaped thanks to the solidarity they found on the New York waterfront.<\/p>\n

The essence of your work is history from below. Would you explain why this is integral to you?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

History from below is an insurgent approach to the study of the past seeking to understand the lives, thoughts and actions of the mass of people who have been left out of the top-down narratives.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0goal is to study the workers of the world, not only as subjects, but as makers of history.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In my case, the ultimate challenge of history from below was to write The Slave Ship: A Human History, 2007. How to write a history of millions of people, forced onto thousands of slave ships and carried across the Atlantic to slave away on plantations, when those people left very few documents of their own?<\/p>\n

I argued that the resistance of enslaved people on the lower decks of slavers was crucial to the growth of an anti-slavery movement and ultimately to the ending of the slave trade altogether.<\/p>\n

I picked up that theme again in\u00a0Freedom Ship<\/em>, showing that the quest for self-emancipation in the 19th century were a direct continuation of those that began among an earlier generation of struggles aboard the slave ships.<\/p>\n

Harriet Tubman captured this continuity of oppression and resistance when she described escaping slavery by sea as a \u201cmiddle passage\u201d to freedom.<\/p>\n