Discipline and Punish

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 10 identifies the daily routines that, for some three hundred years, facilitated the shipping of human cargoes across the Atlantic. By the mid-eighteenth century, these routines, and their associated assemblages, had standardized to an extraordinary degree. The outcome was an assemblage of practice evidenced in many of the primary sources central to this book and collated here. It is argued that the routines of surveillance, discipline, and punishment on British slave ships shared much with those of the prison and convict transport systems. It is also argued that exposure to these practices gave captives an initial familiarity with many aspects of the plantation regimes they would later encounter in the Americas.