Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora is a book by Stephanie E. Smallwood and the 2008 winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. The book attempts to tell the story of enslaved Africans through the accounts of the Royal Africa Company (RAC) from 1675 to 1725. Themes European Alteration of the Economy of West Africa Smallwood demonstrates that Europeans altered and exploited the economy and political structure of West Africa. The market economy created by demand for slaves created an environment in the West African littoral that, for those marked for forced labor, became an inexorable march towards the slaving ships. European market demands created expansionist policies in the emerging states of West Africa. By supplying these states with guns and access to wealth, Europeans allowed certain groups to establish and maintain hegemony over other groups. These continued conflicts provided captives who were sold to European slave traders, which funded further wars and captures. Commodification One of the most important threads running through Smallwood's book is the process of commodification. This project begins in the introduction, where she contrasts the African slave experience with other migrant experiences: "In place of the networks that link origins and departures, and transform the emigrant into an immigrant, for African captives in the Atlantic system reverberated the traumatic echo of commodification" (18). While other immigrants are allowed to maintain links to their cultures, systems, and geographies, African slaves were deprived of all these. The commodification became complete when slaves were subjected to deprivations that tested the limits of human endurance—all in the name of maximizing profit for the RAC. Using the slave traders' ledgers, Smallwood shows how the great human drama of the slave trade was reduced to notes and "quantitative 'facts.'" These accounting instruments, packaged as they are in the form to be transmitted to headquarters in London, both conceal and reveal the underlying stories. In order to keep alive the fiction that slaving is no more messy than other forms of commodity-trading, bookkeepers needed the instruments of ledgers and quantities, and they needed to believe in the fungibility of human life. "People, tobacco, gold, and gunpowder, all mutually exchangeable against one another, were able to pass smoothly across transactional lines that separated one account from another" (84). The Middle Passage Another of the projects at play in Saltwater Slavery is a troubling of the very notion of the