"The slave ship was a place of torment, torture and terror -- this was its essence," Rediker said.
Rediker's book focuses on British and American slave ships in the 19th century, looking at accounts left by merchants, captains, sailors and slaves. Writing about slave ships was difficult, Rediker said, because very few first-hand accounts are available. Rediker found only three other books on the subject. The sensitive nature of slave history and the prevalence of scholarship on transatlantic trade, as opposed to shipping, made it difficult to find sources for his book, he said.
The history of the slave ship has become crucial to understanding the origins of globalized society, Rediker said.
"The slave ship was a machine of sorts -- a combination of warship, prison and factory," Rediker said. "It was the engine of globalization and critical to plantations and industrialization during the 18th and 19th centuries."
Rediker said he first became interested in maritime history when he was in graduate school. He focused his research on the working class, sailors and others who he felt had been marginalized by history.
"I think we have a bias that only history on the landed parts are real and the oceans and seas are just voids between nations," he said.
Rediker is this year's recipient of the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians, given annually to the best book on social history. Rediker first won the award 20 years ago for his previous work, which looked at the lives of seamen and pirates and the globalization brought about by transatlantic trade.
"[The new book] is different from my past research, but it is the reader who decides whether or not the book will appear in future bibliographies," Rediker said. "I think it will have a significant influence on future scholarship because when I was working 30 years ago, others called maritime history work on the marginalized souls, but not anymore."
The lecture was organized by Gretchen Gerzina, the chair of Dartmouth's English department, and professor Susannah Heschel of the Jewish studies department as part of the Faculty Seminars on Race. They decided to bring Rediker for a lecture after he appeared on Gerzina's syndicated radio show to promote his new book.
"This is a new study on an important topic, a topic that we as Americans need to educate ourselves about," Heschel said. "This book is written with a lot of passion because of the subject."
