As Black as a Tar: Seamen of African Origin and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Emma Christopher

This paper will examine African, African-American, Afro-British and Afro-Caribbean men who worked on board British and North American slave ships. It will explore the factors that led them to take such work and the ways in which they interacted with both European crew members and captive slaves. It will argue that these men were a central part of the eighteenth-century Atlantic movement of working-class peoples who travelled all ways around the ocean, as well as comprising an early “black Atlantic” that spread information and abolitionism around the port cities of the North Atlantic.

[WP# 04CR001]