ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the material entity of the slave ship itself and the social relations embedded within it. The ideological justification of slavery was entwined in complex ways with antiquity and the classical. Many European revolutionaries took their inspiration from the democratic projects of Athens — itself a slave state. Marcus Wood, in his work on the visual representation of slavery, has problematized the notion of a recoverable reality through aesthetic productions such as Turner's painting. The sea for Wood is both executioner and emancipator — 'The Sea, however, is not only a personification of the tortured slave, but other personifications, simultaneously. The passage to the Americas was a defining part of that emergent modern experience. It encapsulated all of the contradictions of that nascent society and ironically in hindsight was a victory of human cultures against mastery and subjugation.
