Black Atlantic Maritime Networks, resistance and the American 'domestic' slave trade

This article contributes to the history of Atlantic maritime radicalism during the Age of Revolution by examining the formation and operation of maritime networks of resistance and solidarity in the context of the coastwise United States. ‘domestic’ slave trade. After 1807, the seas along the Atlantic seaboard and into the Gulf of Mexico were enclosed for the purposes of legally trans-shipping enslaved peoples from the Chesapeake to the antebellum slave markets. The Florida Straits – a densely trafficked maritime chokepoint – became a contested space shaped legally, geo-politically, and physically by the limits of slavery at sea. Rather than viewing this globally significant maritime space as primarily a site of contestation between British imperial sovereignty and US internecine national politics, this article focuses on the undercurrents of collective Black Atlantic political action, memory and connection that shaped the Straits as a trans-national maritime route from slavery to freedom from below.