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• Introduction
  • AMA has four sections, entitled respectively:

    
    Africa,
    Europeans,
    The Love of Liberty (the slave ship) and
    America; and an
    Epilogue.
    
    I have listed the principal sources I used for each section, plus some I found after the writing. I have done my best to arrange each list by topic. More general matter appears on this page. Subject to the limitations of copyright I have included some relevant extracts of text.  
    
    Ama's story is set in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.  It starts in an unnamed Konkomba hamlet in what is now the northern region of Ghana and follows the route:  - Yendi - Kafaba - Kumase - Elmina - Middle Passage - Salvador - Engenho.  Maps on another page show the route.
    
    The references are limited, more or less, to this slice of time and space.  I have added two further sections, one dealing with Attitudes to Slavery and the Slave Trade and the other with Miscellaneous relevant matters of interest. My selections from texts are somewhat arbitrary, based on my estimate of  what a serious but non-specialist reader might consider instructive and interesting, but subject to what I have been able to find in Accra. My guess is that there is more recent material of which I am not aware.
    
    My hope is that curious readers of AMA will be persuaded  to read further and that this web site will get them started. The texts and references might also help critical readers to judge the authenticity and plausibility of Ama's story.
    
    Researching for AMA, I read voraciously and, at least in the early stages, with a certain lack of discipline. The material here is somewhat more organized than was my reading: I certainly didn't read these works in the order given.  For one thing, I was constrained by what was available in three excellent but cash-starved libraries: the Balme Library and the Institute of African Studies Library at the University of Ghana, Legon and the George Padmore Library in Accra.  At a later date I spent a few days in the Schomberg Library in Harlem, searching for works which I had been unable to unearth in Ghana.
    
    I tried to paint an accurate, fair and plausible picture of the societies through which Ama passes.  I tried too hard, it seems, for the first manuscript of the novel was 300,000 words long, double the length, I was told, that any publisher would consider. With some reluctance I followed my agent's advice to strip out anything that didn't have a direct bearing on the story.
    
    I had lived in Ghana for some 25 years when I set out to write AMA and I found, to my shame, that I had acquired no more than a superficial understanding of the history of the country and its peoples. I needed to do a great deal of homework.   
    
    As I read, I tried to maintain an awareness of the danger that my own background might influence my understanding and distort the story I had to tell. Others will have to judge whether I have been successful.
    
    In The Atlantic Slave Trade and Black Africa, P. E. H. Hair  writes, 

    Almost total lack of evidence makes it uncertain whether slaves ever condemned the institutions of enslavement in Africa (without abolitionist prompting); and also whether the institutions were ever condemned within African communities.  It is, perhaps, in both cases unlikely.  The feelings and sufferings of the slaves are partly unimaginable, inasmuch as they were related to the circumstances of a previous life we know little about.  Standard descriptions which concentrate on those aspects easily comprehensible to modern middle class sentiment cannot tell the whole story.

  • I set out, with foolish ambition perhaps, to confound this view.

   

• Sleeve notes on The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas 
  

  • The Slave Trade 
    Hugh Thomas
    Published by Simon & Schuster 1997 Hardcover, 908 pages ISBN: 0-684-81063-8
    
    No great historical subject is so laden with modern controversy or so obscured by myth and legend as the slave trade. Who were the slaves? How profitable was the business? Why did many African rulers and people collaborate?
    
    Now, finally, we have a balanced account, in a book as exciting and readable as it is important. Hugh Thomas, the author of such major historical works as Conquest and The Spanish Civil War, has spent more than thirty years studying in archives and libraries throughout Europe, Africa, the United States, and Latin America, and how now produced a major work of interpretation.
    
    The strength of Hugh Thomas's book is that it begins with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, before Columbus's voyage to the New World, and ends with the last gasp of the slave trade, long since made illegal elsewhere, in Cuba and Brazil twenty-five years after the American Emancipation Proclamation. His narrative is vividly alive with villains and heroes, and illuminated by eyewitness accounts, many of which are published here for the first time.
    
    Never before has the colossal impact of the slave trade been so meticulously described: It was not only people who made their fortunes by slaving but whole nations--for though slaves were shipped to the New World on a large scale by Spain and Portugal to cut sugar cane or to dig for gold, they were themselves, in fact, as valuable as the commodities for which they labored and died, the most precious cargo of all.
    
    The Atlantic slave trade was one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all history. Between 1492 and about 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to one port of another of the Americas. They were taken to work on sugar, coffee, cocoa, and cotton plantations, in gold and silver mines, in rice fields, or in houses as servants. The shippers were, in order of scale, the Portuguese (and Brazilians), the English, the French, the Spaniards, the Dutch, and the North Americans. At the height of the traffic, in the 1780s, the English and French were each carrying forty thousand slaves a year. These captives were usually procured by barter with African monarchs or merchants who were established on the estuaries of nearly all the great African rivers that flow into the Atlantic. The goods exchanged for slaves were textiles, copper or iron bars, guns, drink (wine, brandy, and rum), and a vast number of miscellaneous objects such as beads, hats, shaving bowls, and knives. Hundreds of thousands of Africans participated in the trade, but especially the kings in Ashanti, Dahomey, Benin, Laongo, Congo, and Angola. Mozambique and Madagascar also contributed their thousands of prisoners to the European boats.
    
    Slavery in Africa resulted from captivity in war, from kidnappings or raids on neighbors, or sometimes from judicial decisions after crimes.
    
    Slavery made England rich, as it had made Spain and Portugal rich before her; slavery to satisfy the need of France's Caribbean possessions made France rich and was still important enough commercially in the nineteenth century to make Napoleon sacrifice a French army to put down the slave revolt in what is now Haiti. Hugh Thomas gives the reader the facts about the slave trade--shows us how whole towns, like Bristol and Liverpool in England, Nantes in France, or Newport in Rhode Island, grew and prospered on slavery; how each new discovery and colonization spurred the demand for slave labor. He confronts the thorny subject of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, documents the fact that many of the New England whaling captains become successful slavers on the side, and tells the story of the rising tide of the antislavery movement, first against the trade and then against the institution of slavery itself. He describes the work of men such as Montesquieu in France, Wilberforce in England, and Anthony Benezet in the United States who finally succeeded in turning public opinion against slavery and making it illegal in Europe and the New World.
    

  • Table of Contents
    List of Maps
    Introduction
    Book One: Green Sea of Darkness
    1. What Heart Could Be So Hard?
    2. Humanity Is Divided into Two
    3. The Slaves Who Find the Gold Are All Black
    4. The Portuguese Served for Setting Dogs to Spring the Game
    5. I Herded Them As If They Had Been Cattle
    6. The Best and Strongest Slaves Available
    7. For the Love of God, Give Us a Pair of Slave Women
    8. The White Men Arrived in Ships with Wings
    Book Two: The Internationalization of the Trade
    9. A Good Correspondence with the Blacks
    10. The Black Slave Is the Basis of the Hacienda
    11. Lawful to Set to Sea
    12. He Who Knows How to Supply the Slaves Will Share This Wealth
    Book Three: Apogee
    13. No Nation Has Plunged So Deeply into This Guilt
    14. By the Grace of God
    Book Four: The Crossing
    15. A Filthy Voyage
    16. Great Pleasure from Our Wine
    17. Slave Harbors I
    18. Slave Harbors II
    19. A Great Strait for Slaves
    20. The Blackest Sort with Short Curled Hair
    21. If You Want to Learn How to Pray, Go to Sea
    22. God Knows What We Shall Do with Those That Remain
    Book Five: Abolition
    23. Above All a Good Soul
    24. The Loudest Yelps for Liberty
    25. The Gauntlet Had Been Thrown Down
    26. Men in Africa of As Fine Feeling As Ourselves
    27. Why Should We See Great Britain Getting All the Slave Trade?
    Book Six: The Illegal Era
    28. I See...We Have Not Yet Begun the Golden Age
    29. The Slaver Is More Criminal Than the Assassin
    30. Only the Poor Speak Ill of the Slave Trade
    31. Active Exertions
    32. Slave Harbors of the Nineteenth Century
    33. Sharks Are the Invariable Outriders of All Slave Ships
    34. Can We Resist the Torrent? I Think Not
    35. They All Eagerly Desire It, Protect It and Almost Sanctify It
    36. Cuba, the Forward Sentinel
    Epilogue
    The Slave Trade: A Reflection
    Appendix 1. Some Who Lived to Tell the Tale
    Appendix 2. The Trial of Pedro Jose de Zulueta in London for Trading in Slaves
    Appendix 3. Estimated Statistics
    Appendix 4. Selected Prices for Slaves, 1440-1870
    Appendix 5. The Voyage of the Enterprize
    Sources and Credits
    Index

   

• John Lynch reviews The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas.

  • TLS Friday December 19 1997
    This monstrous migration
    John Lynch
    
    THE SLAVE TRADE. The history of the Atlantic slave trade, 1440-1870. By Hugh Thomas. 810pp. Macmillan. Pounds 25. - 0 330 35437 X.
    
    Slavery and the slave trade are old subjects periodically revisited by historians and revived by activists. Slaves and their ships have been counted and classified, the merchants pursued, the abolitionists identified. The traditional sense of outrage has been replaced by a new agenda, one of moralizing and breast-beating, usually European-beating by those with a political axe to grind. In the 1960s, angry young lecturers mounted slave-history courses to demonstrate their revolutionary credentials. Now museums are founded, exhibitions held and curious demands are made for apology, even for compensation.  
    
    Hugh Thomas arrives opportunely to take a cool look at the evidence and set the record straight. He is one of the very few historians writing in Britain today who can tackle a subject on this scale, cope with the international dimension, gather sources from many countries and present the results in a narrative which appeals to scholars and public alike. At a time when professional historians speak almost exclusively to each other, he reverts to a more classical tradition and addresses a wider audience. In spite of the subject, this is not an exercise in indignation. "The slave trade was, of course, an iniquity", he states, but otherwise does not join the tendency towards self-incrimination. He prefers to study the social context, commercial organization and entrepreneurs who financed and profited from the trade, while not neglecting its victims. The book is state-of-the-art, based to a large degree on primary sources, most of them in print, reinforced at key points by the author's own archival research. The Slave Trade is inspired not only by new research but also by originality of analysis, interpretation and insight. This is the most comprehensive account of the Atlantic slave trade now available, one which will satisfy readers for many generations to come and remain an indispensable source of reference; a detailed and eloquent narrative, strong on the sixteenth century, flagging somewhat in the seventeenth but picking up thereafter, is enhanced by a fine sense of judgment throughout.
    
    Slavery, black and white, was inherited from medieval Europe; its modern history dated from the early sixteenth century, when Spanish rulers authorized the transport of African slaves to the New World to work in plantations and mines wherever Indians were unavailable or unsuitable. The market for slaves soon covered most of the Americas. Spain did not normally carry the slaves in its own ships, not through any moral inhibition, but because it lacked the shipping capacity. Portuguese, Dutch, French and English shippers, therefore, competed for contracts, or asientos, giving them exclusive rights to sell slaves to Spanish colonists. The Portuguese were expert slavers, supplying the needs of others as well as of their own Brazilian plantations. Weak in Europe, they fought like tigers for their overseas assets and their slave supplies. In 1641, the Dutch occupied Luanda, the base of the Angola slave trade, thus threatening to starve Portuguese Brazil of its plantation labour; the Portuguese fought back, reconquered Luanda and for good measure expelled the Dutch from Brazil. In developing the Angola-Brazil axis, the Portuguese created a model slaving operation. Of the 11,328,000 slaves delivered to the Americas during the entire history of the trade, over 35 per cent went to Brazil. The Portuguese were callous slavers. A Swedish observer testified in the 1780s, "Some slave merchants were sending a few ships to Mozambique for slaves. They told me that, though in the long, cold and stormy voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, many more of the slaves died than even in the passage from the coast of Guinea to the West Indies, yet their cheapness in Mozambique fully compensated for their increased mortality."
    
    It was some time before the English colonies in North America needed slaves on a large scale, but when they did, each acquired its own slaving history, recounted here in telling detail. In the mean time, English traders and shippers moved up the league to occupy second place among the international carriers of slaves. The conditions on their ships were no better than on the rest. The slave Equiano, who lived to tell the tale, recorded the innate cruelty of the Atlantic crossing and the sufferings of chained victims: The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced constant perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.
    
    The factors underlying the slave trade were complex and contradictory; this is one of the distinguishing conclusions of Hugh Thomas's account. Race, class and gender, the secular trinity worshipped by modern historians, were present, but are consigned here to their proper level. At the African end of the trade, blacks enslaved blacks. In the Americas, the money of the buyer was virtually the only criterion for owning slaves. Indian communities in Upper Peru owned slaves, and throughout the subcontinent mixed races owned slaves. Religious houses owned slaves. The Jesuits, protectors of the Guarani Indians against the Paulista slavers, were among the largest slave-owners in all the Americas and apparently the most efficient in calculating profit and loss on their investment. Convents owned slaves; young novices would often take one or two of their families' slaves to work for them in the cloisters. As the foot soldiers, militia and hangmen of empire, ex-slaves were authorized to kill whites if they were enemies of the king or his officials.
    
    There are few moral heroes in this story, only appeasers grasping all the excuses known to man to elevate profit over principles. Neither Church nor State provided an escape route from this monstrous migration across the Atlantic. Governments were determined to protect their overseas interests and support their national merchants and planters; so opportunities for manumission, unless the slave could purchase it, were few and far between. For England, John Hawkins was a slaver and Francis Drake an accomplice. Slavery became one of the great stains on the Catholic Church, worse than its record in other controversies of the period. In general, from the popes downwards, the Church accepted the fact of slavery, and through its welfare and humanitarian organizations sought to mitigate its consequences; these, of course, were powerless to protect the slaves from the horrors of the Atlantic crossing and cruelty on the high seas. The popes seem to have doubted the power of their words to change events. It was not until the unequivocal statements of Pius VII (1814) and Gregory XVI (1837) that the papacy condemned the slave trade. Missionaries seemed more interested in souls than in sufferings. Even the great Brazilian defender of Indians, Antonio Vieira, quoted by Thomas, asserted, "Without blacks there is no Pernambuco and, without Angola, there are no blacks." As for the theologians, they were not unanimous, nor exemplary, and the author looks in vain for doubting voices. Yet there were some.
    
    In 1681, two Capuchin missionaries working in Venezuela, Francisco Jose de Jaca, Spanish, and Epifanio de Moirans, French, neither of them identified in these pages, met in Havana and drew up indictments of slavery, condemning the institution and all who participated in it. From church pulpits, using Thomist arguments, they preached that slaves were free men, held by masters against all justice; they should be freed immediately, and masters who refused should be denied absolution. The two friars were promptly arrested, excommunicated and shipped back to Spain as subversives. There, the Council of the Indies, convinced that slavery and the slave trade were necessary for the survival of the Spanish Indies, prohibited the friars from ever returning to America.
    
    Spain offered no hope, Britain even less, until the Quakers and Methodists took up the challenge in the eighteenth century. Thomas includes a detailed study of abolition, which shows that the support of the Enlightenment for slave freedom was purely theoretical. From Montesquieu onwards, the philosophes denounced slavery as useless and uneconomical as well as evil, but they did not make a crusade of abolition, and contributed less to the cause than contemporary movements in England and France, inspired by humanitarian ideals and religious convictions. In the event, Britain took the lead, and the trade was declared illegal from May 1, 1807; soon, at least in law, the United States followed suit. The Spanish American revolutionaries abolished the slave trade as soon as they controlled government, though slavery itself took longer to eradicate, as it did in the British colonies. Simon Bolivar, with a firmer moral instinct than Thomas Jefferson, thought it "madness that a revolution for liberty should try to maintain slavery". He liberated his own slaves, first in 1814 on condition of military service, when about fifteen accepted, then unconditionally in 1821 when over a hundred profited. Few landowners followed his example, and Bolivar learnt that moral arguments were not enough.
    
    Yet abolition acquired new friends in the nineteenth century. In Peru, for example, the Church became an active agent in the demise of slavery, as it began to intervene decisively in the relationship between slaves and masters. To defend the integrity of slave marriage, the Church opposed the break-up of slave families. Slaves were able to exploit this concession which thus became an instrument of greater freedom. The intervention of the Church limited the legal ability of slave owners to block slave marriages. Moreover, masters who attempted to sell married slaves outside the city of Lima, or who sexually abused their female slaves, might find themselves attacked not only by their slaves but also by the Church. This assault on the power of slave-holders helped to bring about the end of slavery in a society where family bonds were decisive for manumission.
  • 
    Hugh Thomas remarks that "Any historian of the slave trade is conscious of a large gap in this picture. For the slave remains an unknown warrior, invoked by moralists on both sides of the Atlantic, recalled now in museums in one-time slave ports from Liverpool to Elmina, but all the same unspeaking, and therefore remote and elusive". This is true of the slave trade itself, but not of the life of the slave in the Americas. The author makes a legitimate distinction between the trade and the institution, as the abolitionists themselves did, and he limits his investigation to the former. On a further path, however, the historian can follow the slaves into the plantations, mines, houses and other scenes of their labours, and obtain an occasional glimpse of their mentalities. This is an area of research which has uncovered some of the more interesting results in recent slave studies. Slave escapes, rebellions, hideouts, the lives of urban slaves and their families, these and other subjects have expanded our knowledge of slaves in the final period of their American history, as the record of Peru's slaves suggests.
    
    The book ends with a reflection. The author concludes that abolition owed more to individual abolitionists than to the fact that it hindered agrarian and industrial growth. Economic forces, it may be agreed, are too easily invoked to establish a general thesis encompassing the origins, process and end of the slave trade; various other factors hastened abolition, and slave resistance itself played a part. The author's argument here is persuasive, if not conclusive, and it reflects the balance of the work in general. In presenting it, Hugh Thomas has written a book which is distinguished for its scholarship, its judgment and its style.
    
    

  • John Lynch is Emeritus Professor of Latin American History,  University of London.
    

• Leonard Bushkoff reviews The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas
  

  • The Christian Science Monitor
    Features
    Thursday January 29, 1998 Edition
    Books
    THE SLAVE TRADE: THE STORY OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE: 1440-1870
    By Hugh Thomas
    Simon & Schuster   908 pp., $38
    
    Ambitious History Of Atlantic Slave Trade Bogs Down in Detail
    
    Leonard Bushkoff, Special to The Christian Science Monitor
    
    BOSTON -- Hugh Thomas is, quite simply, a phenomenon. This remarkably productive, popularizing historian has written a dozen or more books over a 35-year span. They range from his most famous work, on the Spanish Civil War, through studies of the cold war, modern Cuba, global technology, the conquest of Mexico, and now this overwhelming tome, "The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870."
    
    But there are difficulties with this latest work: a lack of discipline and much structure beyond chronology.
    
    Of course, Thomas is fluent in the French and especially the Spanish sources. Unfortunately, there is little penetration, little attempt to develop themes, present ideas, or get to the bottom of things.
    
    The result is a bloated, slap-dash assemblage of facts and factlets that includes every conceivable name, but imposes a casual, occasionally cynical, irony on the vital questions of motivation and causality.
    
    There are endless recitals of expeditions undertaken, African slaves carried off, sold in the New World, and marched to their new "homes"; of this profitable business fought over by Portuguese, then Spanish, then Dutch, then French, then British, and finally American slavers; of the pirates, privateers, and men of war that hovered around the edges; and of the changes in wealth and politics that influenced the trade.
    The book contains not one, but two back-to-back texts, the first dealing with "high" slavery, its period of acceptance and expansion, principally by Spain and Portugal from the 15th century onward; the second with its rejection by the two expanding Western democracies, Britain and the United States, and the consequent efforts at worldwide elimination during 1780 to 1860.
    
    The watershed between these two falls during 1776-1815, the period of the American and French nationalist and democratic revolutions. Entitled the "World Revolution of the West," this period destroyed the ideological - though not the economic - basis for a slavery that was seen thereafter in the northern US and especially in Great Britain as an unmitigated horror, unworthy of survival, and ripe for attack by the Royal Navy.
    
    This massive shift in thinking goes essentially unnoticed by Thomas, aside from a very few pages on the Enlightenment. His text is too focused on the minutiae of the names of ships, of their captains, the number of guns they bore, and the events that befell them. Thomas does, to be sure, emphasize the role of William Wilberforce, the English statesman, the British Quakers and Methodists, but fails to convey their antislavery fervor.
    
    Thomas is little interested in ideas and political movements, but very much in economic growth - sugar tonnage, cotton exports, the cost of slaves - and the wealthy entrepreneurs this involved. He is entirely oblivious to the individuals held as slaves, the great unknown in a book purporting to be about a process in which they were central. Though slave revolts are mentioned, for example, and clearly the masters were increasingly apprehensive about them from 1800 onward, nothing else is stated.
    
    The result is an outmoded, virtually 19th-century-like history. It lacks context. It presents one fact after another, strung together chronologically. Only dominant men have roles. Its central figures are mere creatures, without feelings, let alone ideas.
    
    * Leonard Bushkoff regularly reviews history for the Monitor.

   

• David Brion Davis reviews The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas and The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 by Robin Blackburn

  • Reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books

  • Copyright ©1998 NYREV,Inc. http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19980611050R
    

  • June 11, 1998

  • A Big Business
    DAVID BRION DAVIS

  • 
    The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870
    by Hugh Thomas
    908 pages, $37.50 (hardcover)
    published by Simon and Schuster
    
    The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800
    by Robin Blackburn
    602 pages, $22.00 (paperback), $35.00 (hardcover)
    published by Verso

  •  
    

  By limiting their attention to nation-states, especially the United States, historians have usually fragmented and obscured our understanding of the multinational Atlantic slave system. When most Americans hear the words “African-American slavery,” they immediately think of the South and the Civil War. The story supposedly begins in Virginia, in 1619, when a colonist named John Rolfe casually noted that “a dutch man of warre… sold us twenty Negars.”¹ At best, the standard texts make only passing reference to the flow of African labor to the Caribbean, Spanish America, and Portuguese Brazil. Even in US history, the subject of slavery has traditionally been given a marginal place—a chapter, as it were, in the history of the South (or recently a more prominent position in African-American studies).² Even most American college graduates would probably be astonished to learn that Portugal began importing slaves from sub-Saharan Africa in the 1440s; that well before Columbus’s famous voyages the Portuguese were exploiting black slave labor on sugar plantations in Madeira and São Tomé, off the coast of West Africa; and that enslaved African migrants to the New World greatly outnumbered European immigrants in the first three hundred and twenty years of settlement.
  
  An understanding of the phenomenon of racial slavery, even in a specific locale such as Virginia or Texas, requires some knowledge of what Robin Blackburn terms “The Old World Background of New World Slavery,” as well as some knowledge of the multinational character of the Atlantic slave trade, the slave colonies, and the growing markets that absorbed the latter’s produce.
  
  Why did “white slavery” flourish in the early Middle Ages and then disappear and become morally repugnant in the very Northern European nations that became leaders in establishing plantation colonies and transporting millions of African workers to the New World? Why was it that African kings and merchants from the Senegambia region on down to the Niger delta, the Congo, and on south and eastward to Madagascar and Mozambique, continued to sell such staggering numbers of slaves, with only rare and brief protests, to Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, English, French, Swedish, Danish, German, American, Cuban, and Brazilian traders?
  
  Why did the representatives of so many different religions—Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, New Christians, even Moravians and for a time Quakers—express so few scruples about buying and selling human beings? How can we explain the diffusion of racial slavery into non-plantation regions, such as New England and French Canada, so that black slaves could be found by 1750 from the St. Lawrence to the Rio de la Plata, from Québec and Boston to Santiago? If American colonists like young John Adams could angrily claim in 1765 that the mother country was treating them like “Negroes,” what does this say about the psychological influence of African-American slaves on the construction of white Creole, or American, identities?³ Finally, what was the relationship between New World slavery, traditionally interpreted as a backward or regressive institution, and the much-debated industrial revolution and emergence of “modernity”?
  
  

  ---

  
  Many thousands of scholarly works on New World slavery have appeared since the pioneering books in the 1940s and 1950s by Eric Williams, Frank Tannenbaum, Kenneth M. Stampp, and Stanley Elkins. Nevertheless, very few historians have succeeded in conveying the global dimensions of a ghastly system that first united five continents as Europeans traded Asian textiles, among other commodities, for African slaves who, after surviving the horrors of the Middle Passage to North or South America, were forced to produce the sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton that helped to stimulate and sustain modern consumer economies. There are various reasons for this historical neglect, even apart from the racial myopia of white scholars and the parochial focus of histories limited to a particular nation-state. We are only beginning to discover the immense quantity and relative inaccessibility of many relevant records and sources. This problem is matched by the complexity and contentiousness of many issues, such as the effects within Africa of exporting millions of slaves for some twelve centuries to Asia (between 869 and 883 CE black slaves rebelled and fought Arab armies in the Tigris-Euphrates delta), and millions more for over four centuries to Portugal, Spain, and then the entire Western Hemisphere. Moreover, few historians today have a command of the nine or more languages needed to study the most important surviving records concerning the Atlantic slave trade.
  
  Future scholars will fortunately have access to the records of at least 27,233 Atlantic slave trading voyages in a “data set” gathered, organized, and put on CD-ROM by the Du Bois Institute at Harvard.⁴ This collection is said to cover some 90 percent of all British, French, and Dutch slave trading voyages, and more than two thirds of the estimated grand total. By pressing a few keys on their computers, historians and students will soon be able to track particular voyages on the Middle Passage and assemble information on captains, ship owners, ship size, crew, mortality, the number and sex of slaves, slave revolts, and changing patterns of the trade from 1562 to the late nineteenth century. Moreover, the UNESCO Slave Route Project has sponsored international conferences and teams of researchers in an attempt to gather and preserve records in five continents regarding the greatest involuntary human migration in history. While the UNESCO scholars have searched for materials from Haiti and Jamaica to the Vatican, their most original and significant findings may well be indigenous African records, many of them in Arabic, which need to be saved from various environmental hazards.⁵ It may be evidence of the speed of the information revolution that neither Hugh Thomas nor Robin Blackburn mentions the Du Bois Institute data set, the UNESCO materials, or the flow of information and continuing discussions on the Internet Slavery List.
  
  

  ---

  
  There is a pressing need at the moment, however, for accurate and comprehensive syntheses of the specialized studies usually known only to specialists. It is remarkable that the two long and immensely ambitious books under review were both published in the same year, 1997, that both are the product of many years of extensive research (mostly in secondary sources), and that both are written by Englishmen. Perhaps Britons, drawing on their own traditions of imperial history, find it easier to take on such immense subjects as the making of New World slavery and 430 years of the Atlantic slave trade. As an unapologetic Marxist, editor of The New Left Review, and author of the outstanding book The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848,⁶ Robin Blackburn writes in the great tradition of E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm. Hugh Thomas, who was made a life peer in the House of Lords in 1981, has written more popular works on a variety of subjects including the Spanish Civil War and the conquest of Mexico, as well as World History: The Story of Mankind from Prehistory to the Present.
  
  Thomas provides a straightforward narrative account of Muslim and Christian slave-making and how it was succeeded by the fifteenth-century Portuguese naval expeditions that first captured and then began purchasing slaves along Africa’s western coast. Thomas is especially knowledgeable about Iberian history and presents much new personal detail regarding the early Portuguese and Spanish slave traders and the families who profited from the traffic. After moving on to the Dutch, English, and French internationalization of the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century, Thomas devotes eight chapters to the ways Africans were enslaved by other Africans and the stages of lethal transport from the interior of the continent to the putrid barracoons on the coast and on the tightly packed, stifling slave ships to their ultimate destinations in the New World. The last part of the book deals with the abolition movement, the nature of the slave trade in the nineteenth century, and Britain’s aggressive measures to suppress it. One senses that Thomas would like to be regarded as a pure empiricist and storyteller. He shuns theories and theorizing, but deluges the reader with torrents of facts—facts which are often fascinating but which, as we shall see below, include a disturbing number of mistakes.
  
  Although The Making of New World Slavery is less well-written than Thomas’s book, it will have far greater appeal to scholars. Blackburn’s introduction is dense and disjointed, and it contains obligatory quotations from Foucault and Baudrillard, and addresses such fashionable themes as “modernity,” “identity,” and “the dynamics of civil society.”
  
  It was long reassuring, as Blackburn rightly suggests, “to identify slavery with traditionalism, patrimonialism and backwardness.” This was the lesson of classical social science from the time of Adam Smith (Blackburn also mentions in this connection Auguste Comte, Max Weber, and Ludwig von Mises, but not Karl Marx). While Robert William Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman, Claudia Dale Goldin, and other “econometricians” have won much acclaim for documenting the productivity, profitability, and capitalist character of slavery in the American South, Blackburn is the first historian to explore at some length the role of the larger New World slave system in “the advent of modernity,” by which he means the arrival of the modern industrial economy. After making tantalizing but undeveloped references to a kind of Darwinian “’natural selection’ of social institutions and practices” that favored plantation slavery, he sensibly concludes that “slavery in the New World was above all a hybrid mixing ancient and modern, European business and African husbandry, American and Eastern plants and processes, elements of traditional patrimonialism with up-to-date bookkeeping and individual ownership.” Blackburn’s long chapters move from the Old World background and the uses of racial slavery in Portugal, Africa, and the various New World colonies to the eighteenth-century economic boom and British industrialization.
  
  With respect to the Africans’ part in selling as many as eleven or twelve million slaves to Europeans, nothing in either book rivals a succinct quotation from the late African-American scholar Nathan Huggins, which Blackburn uses as one of his first epigrams:
  The twentieth-century Western mind is frozen by the horror of men selling and buying others as slaves and even more stunned at the irony of black men serving as agents for the enslavement of blacks by whites…. The racial wrong was lost on African merchants, who saw themselves as selling people other than their own. The distinctions of tribe were more real to them than race, a concept that was yet to be refined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western rationalists.
  
  

  ---

  
  Despite inevitable overlap and repetition when discussing slavery or the slave trade in the centuries from the 1440s to the 1770s, the new books by Thomas and Blackburn could hardly be more different. Thomas affirms at the outset that “historians should not look for villains,” but 784 pages later he praises “the heroes”—the French, British, American, and Spanish writers and abolitionists who “achieved the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and of slavery in the Americas.” Very little is said in either book about slave heroes and slave resistance, though Blackburn discussed some slave resistance and especially the impact of the Haitian Revolution in his 1989 book.
  
  Blackburn succeeds in conveying a deep sense of the “superexploitation” of millions of black slaves working millions of uncompensated hours to produce wealth that flowed into white industrial investment and conspicuous display. He shows no hesitation in identifying the historical villains: not the Baroque governments and popes that first authorized the African slave trade so much as the “civil society” that broke with the traditional “moral economy” and unleashed “rampant capitalism and the free market.” While Blackburn’s arguments regarding civil society and the transition “from baroque to modern” are difficult to follow, he reinforces the often forgotten point made by Robert William Fogel (and many others) that market forces and economic self-interest can produce the most immoral and humanly destructive institutions, epitomized historically by racial slavery in the New World.⁷ I should emphasize that Blackburn does not see the New World slave system as the necessary or optimum path to a modern society. But once chosen, because of its absolute centrality to the history of the past four hundred years it left a profound taint on the Western world we know.
  
  Whereas Thomas totally rejects Eric Williams’s “shocking argument” that profits from the slave trade financed the Industrial Revolution (Williams had not confined his argument to the slave trade, but had spoken of the larger and more ambiguous “triangular trade,” which would presumably include the total profits from New World slavery),⁸ Blackburn carefully considers the diverse views of various economic historians and concludes that while New World slavery did not produce capitalism, profits from the New World slave system made a significant contribution to British economic growth and investment in manufacturing.
  
  In fact, Thomas provides telling examples that support this view, such as John Ashton, a Liverpool slave trader who helped finance the canal to Manchester; John Kennion and Brian Blundell, also of Liverpool, who turned to cotton manufacture and coal mining; and the great eighteenth-century French slave trader, René Montaudoin, who founded in Nantes “a factory in the modern sense of the word which made the first dyed cottons.” And quite apart from the disputed question of profits and investment, Blackburn points to the slave system’s neglected contribution to “the evolution of industrial discipline and principles of capitalist rationalization.”
  
  One thinks, for example, of Joseph J. Ellis’s recent portrait of Thomas Jefferson as an efficiency expert, a kind of proto-Frederick Winslow Taylor, personally enforcing “a rigid regimen” on the dozen or so young slave boys, “from 10 to 16 years of age,” who worked long hours producing nails at the small factory at Monticello.⁹ Blackburn goes on to note the seeming paradox that “not by chance were prominent Abolitionists in the forefront of prison reform, factory legislation and the promotion of public education.” He might have added that English and American Quakers, who were in the vanguard of the abolition movement, also led the way in devising and imposing new forms of labor discipline. There is a profound historical irony in the fact that “Speedy Fred” Taylor, our century’s exponent of efficiency and the first to dispossess workers of all control of the workplace, was born of Quaker parents in Germantown, Pennsyslvania, the site in 1688 of the world’s first great petition against human bondage.¹⁰
  
  

  ---

  
  British and American abolitionists initiated a tradition of sharply differentiating New World and especially Anglo-American slavery from all previous forms of servitude. They were particularly intent on showing that modern plantation slavery was more inhumane and oppressive than the bondage recognized and sanctioned in the Bible or the servitude found in contemporary Africa. This line of argument later appealed to Marxists and other critics who were eager to demonize capitalism and market forces as the sources of the world’s worst example of human exploitation. Blackburn is surely right when he insists that “the novelty of New World slavery resided in the scale and intensity of the slave traffic and the plantation trades.” But because Blackburn desperately wants to see New World slavery as a unique aberration, as a tragic choice dictated by capitalist greed when other choices were available, he tends to romanticize earlier forms of human bondage. He forgets that slaves in premodern societies have often been subject to cannibalism, torture, ritual sacrifice, sexual exploitation, and arbitrary death at the whim of an owner.
  When Blackburn asserts that “the slavery of the Ancient World had not denied the basic humanity of the slave,” he also forgets the appalling descriptions of slaves in the mine shafts at Laurium in ancient Attica and in Ptolemaic Egypt. One need not dwell on the laws that sanctioned the Romans’ pouring molten lead down the throats of slaves convicted of raping a virgin or crucifying four hundred household slaves after the murder of Pedanius Secundas, in 61 CE, in order to agree with the Quaker John Woolman that no human being is saintly enough to be entrusted with the power of owning a slave as a piece of property, a power which has always involved some degree of dehumanization.¹¹ As Orlando Patterson and other scholars have demonstrated, while small numbers of highly privileged slaves can be found throughout history, even in nineteenth-century Mississippi, the institution of slavery has always depended on violent domination, dishonor, and a kind of “social death.”
  
  

  ---

  
  Hugh Thomas adopts an extremely effective literary device to convey the continuities between slavery in medieval Europe and the New World. His book begins with what seems to be a dramatic turning point in world history: Gomes Eannes de Zurara’s vivid description of the sale, on August 8, 1444, in southwest Portugal, of 235 African slaves, “some white enough,” some “like mulattoes,” others “as black as Ethiops.” This document has often been cited or reprinted to mark the beginning of Europe’s exploitation of Africa. But Thomas proceeds to show that this sale of African slaves was part of a long sequence of events that included centuries of warfare and mutual enslavement between Christians and Muslims; the Christian reconquest of Portugal and Spain and the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, in North Africa, in 1415; the development of the Arab and Berber caravan trade in gold and slaves, which brought increasing numbers of black slaves (classified as sclavi negri) to Christian Sicily after the mid-1400s; and the westward shift in slave trading and sugar cultivation, which was hastened in 1453 by the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the decline of the Venetian and Genoese trade in “Slavic slaves” from the Black Sea.¹²
  
  Neither Thomas nor Blackburn gives sufficient attention to the precedents set by Italian slave traders in the Black Sea and Mediterranean. As Stephen P. Bensch has pointed out, “Mediterranean slavery has frequently been brushed aside in synthetic treatments of Western servitude as a curious holdover, a peripheral phenomenon,…an unexpected detour on the road leading from servitude to freedom, all the more unsettling because it appeared in the sophisticated urban societies of Italy, Southern France, and Eastern Iberia.”¹³ But Thomas does emphasize the direct continuities between medieval multiracial servitude and the kind of black bondage that first emerged on the sugar-producing Atlantic islands such as Madeira and São Tomé and then spread in the early sixteenth century to the New World. Blackburn provides much similar information, but by placing his brief discussion of the Atlantic islands after his chapter on “The Old World Background to New World Slavery,” he reinforces his theme of discontinuity and distracts attention from the fact that when Columbus first entered the Caribbean, thousands of black slaves in the Old World were already producing sugar for a European market.¹⁴
  

  ---

  
  The most striking evidence of continuity can be seen in the great mercantile and banking families of the Italian Renaissance. The Marchionnis of Florence, for example, had long engaged in the Black Sea slave trade (Kaffa, their base in the Crimea, resembled in many respects the forts and trading posts Europeans would later establish along the West African coast). In 1470, after the Ottoman Turks had endangered the Italian colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and had diminished Europe’s supply of both sugar and slaves, young Bartolommeo Marchionni moved to Lisbon, where he joined a growing community of Florentines.
  Bartolommeo soon owned sugar plantations in Madeira and purchased from the Portuguese king the right to trade in slaves from Guinea.
  
  According to Thomas, Bartolommeo had ships in Vasco da Gama’s expedition to India in 1498 and in Cabral’s expedition of 1500 that discovered Brazil; he became “a monopoly trader in slaves from the Benin River in the 1490s, carrying captives not only to Portugal and Madeira but also to Elmina, on the Gold Coast, where he sold them to African merchants for gold.” One might add that this friend of the Medicis and Amerigo Vespucci also sent African slaves back to Pisa and Tuscany.¹⁵ There were many other Florentines and Genoese who provided links from slave trading in the Mediterranean, which most people took for granted except when Muslim raiders enslaved Europeans, to the new social orders in Madeira, the Canary Islands, São Tomé, the Caribbean, and Brazil.
  
  Judging whether enslavement was a continuous historical process or whether its American form was a historical exception is partly a matter of what historians choose to emphasize, and both Thomas and Blackburn recognize the multinational sponsorship of the early slave trade to the New World. In 1518 Spain’s young King Charles, soon to be the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, received fervent pleas from various Spanish colonists who were alarmed by the mortality and “weakness” of the Indians and who argued that only African slaves, like those in the Atlantic islands, could provide the labor needed to fulfill the New World’s promise. King Charles agreed, and as Thomas puts it, the Flemish-born king awarded the coveted grant for supplying slaves to a Savoyard friend, the governor of Bresse in Burgundy. He in turn sold his rights, through a Castilian, to Genoese merchants—“who, in turn, would, of course, have to arrange for the Portuguese to deliver the slaves. For no Spanish ship could legally go to Guinea [according to the papal Treaty of Tordesillas], the monarchs of the two countries were then allies, and anyway, only the Portuguese could supply slaves in that quantity.”
  

  ---

  
  Perhaps the most startling point that Hugh Thomas makes about the early Portuguese slave trade is the way it became dominated by New Christian or converso merchants. Fernão de Loronha, for example, an associate and successor of Marchionni, gained a temporary monopoly of trade in the Bight of Benin and supplied slaves and wine to Elmina (Africans in the Gold Coast region continued to buy slaves from the Portuguese in exchange for gold). José Rodrigues Mascarenhas and Fernando Jiménez were other sixteenth-century merchants of Jewish ancestry who gained control over large segments of the slave trade to the Americas. King Philip II of Spain awarded Portuguese New Christians with asiento contracts to supply the Spanish colonies with African slaves. Some of these merchants had relatives or close friends in Italy, Brazil, or Antwerp, long the major center for refining and marketing sugar.
  
  Thomas, unlike Blackburn, avoids the error of thinking of these converso merchants as Jews.¹⁶ Since there has been recent controversy over the Jewish role in the Atlantic slave trade,¹⁷ it is important to be on guard against the Inquisition’s or the Nazis’ definition of Jewishness: that is, having the taint of Jewish ancestry. In 1492 many of the Jews expelled from Spain settled in Portugal, and in 1497 the Portuguese king banished all the Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. Given the frequency of intermarriage between New Christians and Old Christians, many of these New Christian families would have lost their converso identity and been assimilated if there had been no doctrine of “purity of blood” and if the Inquisition had not become obsessed with secret “judaizing” practices. Even so, with the passage of time, the great majority of New Christians became absorbed in the Iberian Catholic culture. As Seymour Drescher has pointed out, most of the New Christians who made their fortunes in Africa, Asia, or the Americas returned to Iberia and “were disinclined to resettle where they could openly practice Judaism or even syncretic brands of family religiosity.”¹⁸
  
  But with respect to their participation in the slave trade, the genuineness of the conversos’ Christian faith should be irrelevant. Neither Blackburn nor Thomas fully grasps the central point. The Church and the Catholic crowns prohibited Jews from owning baptized slaves or even traveling to the New World. What qualified men like Antônio Fernandes Elvas and Manuel Rodrigues Lamego to transport thousands of African slaves to the Spanish New World was their convincing Christian identity. According to Thomas, Pope Sixtus V thought so highly of Fernando Jiménez, despite his Jewish ancestry, that “he gave him the right to use his own surname, Peretti.” When doubts arose that a converso merchant or planter was not a genuine Christian, he was often burned at the stake.
  

  ---

  
  On an entirely different note, it would be irresponsible not to mention a problem of accuracy. Factual errors are inevitable in all historical writing and are likely to increase in number as a historian takes on a global subject spanning many centuries. Nevertheless, the frequency and character of Thomas’s mistakes shake the reader’s confidence in his book as a whole. Thus, contrary to Thomas, Massachusetts and New Hampshire did not adopt gradual emancipation acts in the late eighteenth century, and New Jersey’s law came in 1804, not before 1800. The article on the slave trade in Diderot’s Encyclopédie was not written by Louis de Jaucourt, but was plagiarized by him from a work Thomas mentions, George Wallace’s System of the Principles of the Laws of Scotland.¹⁹ Cotton Mather was anything but a Unitarian; indeed, his interest in Yale College (not yet “University”) arose from his fear that Harvard was becoming too liberal. The great slave revolt in St. Domingue (Haiti) began in August 1791, not 1792. The American Whig party, moreover, did not yet exist in 1824, and Charles Fenton Mercer was not an abolitionist. Thomas confuses Jonathan Edwards and James Stephen with their sons. It is simply wrong to assert that “slave movements from Eastern to Western states numbered only about 127,000 between 1810 and 1860, and was worth only $3 million.” (In that period the slave population in the Western states Thomas refers to increased by over 1,821,000.) The most reliable recent studies estimate interregional movements of some 200,000 slaves each decade between 1820 and 1860. The United States acquired Texas in 1845, not “in the wake of the Mexican War.” According to Thomas, there were around six million slaves in Brazil in 1851, an absurdly high figure. Nineteen years later, he writes, without the benefit of any emancipation act, there were only one and a half million. Most embarrassing of all, it is the Declaration of Independence, not the US Constitution, that contains a “passage…where all men were declared free and equal, with inalienable rights.”
  
  To be scrupulously fair, one should stress that The Slave Trade contains over eight hundred pages and that Thomas typically conveys dozens of “facts,” most of them accurate or convincing, on each page. Given the immense amount of work devoted to this volume, it is simply unfortunate that he and his editor were not more careful.
  
  Taking all the more substantial points into account, the new books by Thomas and Blackburn complement each other. Thomas provides much detail of the experiences of slaves and their owners that balances Blackburn’s rather arid but thought-provoking arguments on the place of New World slavery in the cauldron of forces that created the modern world. Thomas’s The Slave Trade will help many general readers grasp the magnitude and profound evil of the greatest forced migration in human history. In spite of its shortcomings, The Making of New World Slavery should long be regarded, along with Blackburn’s The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, as a landmark in twentieth-century historiography.
  ¹ It now seems highly probable that Africans arrived in Virginia before 1619. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Founding Years of Virginia—and the United States,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Winter 1996), and William Thorndale, “The Virginia Census of 1619,” Magazine of Virginia Genealogy, Vol. 33 (1995), pp. 155-170 (I am indebted for this information to a communication on the Internet Slavery List by J. Douglas Deal). One should also note the earlier arrival of numerous black slaves and freedpeople in Spanish Florida. For an excellent new and brief survey of the beginnings of slavery north of Florida, see Betty Wood, The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (Hill and Wang, 1997).
  
  Gordon Wood, writing in these pages, has recently noted the encouraging trend toward comparative history and interest in transatlantic connections (“Doing the Continental,” The New York Review, November 20, 1997, pp. 51-55). But if one looks at the way most academic jobs are defined and at the courses offered by most history departments, it becomes clear that the teaching of history is still sharply categorized by nation-states and such geographic regions as colonial North America, early modern Europe, and East Asia.
  
  ² From the time of World War I, a succession of black historians, including Carter G. Woodson, William M. Brewer, Charles H. Wesley, Benjamin Quarles, and Eric Williams, published significant work on African-American slavery, much of it in The Journal of Negro History. But even the many editions of John Hope Franklin’s now classic work, From Slavery to Freedom, beginning in 1947, had little effect on the marginal treatment of slavery in most high school and college texts.
  
  ³ While historians have long been familiar with the American colonists’ frequently expressed fear of being “enslaved” by the activist British government, T.H. Breen has recently shown that Adams was more specific: “’We won’t be their Negroes,’ snarled a young John Adams in 1765, writing as ’Humphry Ploughjogger’ in the Boston Gazette. Adams crudely insisted that Providence had never intended the American colonists ’for Negroes…and therefore never intended us for slaves…. I say we are as handsome as old English folks, and so should be as free.’” (Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 84, No. 1 [June 1997], p. 29.)
  ⁴ To be published in the coming year by Cambridge University Press. I am indebted to Professor David Eltis, of Queens University, Ontario, for this information, which was given at a conference, “New Perspectives on Slavery and the Slave Trade,” November 20-21, 1997, at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis.
  
  ⁵ I am indebted for this information to Howard Dodson, of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, who presented a report at the November 20-21 Rutgers conference on slavery and the slave trade.
  
  ⁶ Verso, 1988. Reviewed by me in this journal, March 30, 1989.
  ⁷ Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (Norton, 1989). In 1993 Fogel won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science.
  
  ⁸ Some reviewers have confused this first “Williams thesis” with a second thesis that Williams makes: namely, that Britain abolished the slave trade and then emancipated colonial slaves because the systems were in economic decline. This second line of argument has been discredited by numerous studies. See, for example, my essay, “The Benefit of Slavery,” The New York Review, March 31, 1988, pp. 43-45.
  ⁹ American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (Knopf, 1997), p. 141.
  
  ¹⁰ See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 233-254; Sean Wilentz, “Speedy Fred’s Revolution,” The New York Review, November 20, 1997, pp. 32-37. The fact that Quakers were pacificists may lend support to Blackburn’s view that “unrestrained commercial calculation,” not “the military revolution,” was the decisive factor in leading to the “modern rational practices” described by Foucault and Weber.
  
  ¹¹ See my essay, “At the Heart of Slavery,” The New York Review, October 17, 1996, pp. 51-54.
  
  ¹² The word for “slave” in Western European languages was derived from the Latin sclavus, meaning a person of Slavic origin. While most of the words for “slave” in ancient languages had no ethnic connotations, the association with Slavs began in the early Middle Ages when captives from the Balkan region were often transported overland to Muslim Spain. Later, Italian merchants extended the Slavic term to Armenians, Circassians, Georgians, Mingrelians, Bulgarians, Turks, and Tatars who were purchased along the coasts of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov. Though various terms for Africans, such as the French nègre, sometimes became synonymous with “slave,” it is significant that the Slavic linkage (esclave, sklave, esclavo) has persisted for a millennium even though chattel slavery became almost wholly identified with people of sub-Saharan African descent.
  
  ¹³ “From Prizes of War to Domestic Merchandise: The Changing Face of Slavery in Catalonia and Aragon, 1000- 1300,” Viator, Vol. 25 (1994), pp. 63-64.
  
  ¹⁴ Unlike Stuart B. Schwartz’s Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Bahia, 1550-1835 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), which Blackburn closely follows in other respects, Blackburn minimizes the importance of São Tomé and what he calls its “Afro-Jewish, Luso-Catholic planter class.” He fails to note that 70 percent of the Jewish children (he calls them “Jewish New Christian children”) who were abducted from their parents, baptized, and then deported from Portugal to São Tomé soon died; that the survivors who often mated with Africans had few if any ties with Judaism; and that the island served as a crucial bridge between what Schwartz terms “the Mediterranean sugar complex” and American plantation slavery.
  ¹⁵ Charles Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, Tome deux: Italie- Colonies italiennes du Levant-Levant latin-Empire byzantin (Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, 1977), pp. 235, 377.
  
  ¹⁶ Blackburn actually uses the term “Jewish ’New Christians.’” In his Introduction Thomas notes that virtually no Jews were involved in the Anglo-Saxon slave trade and that whether a Portuguese New Christian “is to be seen as a Jew is not something on which I should wish to pronounce: several of the traders concerned proclaimed their or their forefathers’ Christian conversion as genuine to the very last torture afforded by the Inquisition, even if the Holy Office caused to be burned to death in Mexico and in Lima several prominent slave merchants, whom they accused of ’judaizing.’”
  
  Unfortunately, some Jewish historians, identifying with the conversos who were persecuted and burned at the stake, or wanting to expand the extent of Jewish population, have accepted the Inquisitors’ definition of “Jew,” a position decisively rejected by Benzion Netanyahu’s The Marranos of Spain (American Academy of Jewish Research, 1966) and The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Random House, 1995). Of course a few conversos (the word “marrano” meant “swine”) did revert to Judaism when they had the opportunity. For a review of the literature and the difficulties of classifying most New Christians as Jews, see Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (Transaction Publishers, 1998), pp. 50-62, and the essay by Seymour Drescher cited below.
  ¹⁷ See my article, “The Slave Trade and the Jews,” The New York Review, December 22, 1994, pp. 14-16.
  ¹⁸ See Seymour Drescher, “Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1825, edited by Paolo Bernadini (2 volumes, forthcoming from Berghahn Books).
  
  ¹⁹ See my article, “New Sidelights on Early Antislavery Radicalism,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 28 (October 1971), reprinted in Davis, From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 228-237.
  
  
  

   

• James M. Blaut reflects on some special problems of doing African history and Jim La Velle pays tribute to James M. Blaut
  • H-NET List for African History and Culture [H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
    COMMENT: African history sources
    Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2000 01:02:22
    From:  James M. Blaut, University of Illinois at Chicago
           
    John Dunn asks whether research on African history follows
    different rules than research on European history. In one
    important sense the answer is "yes." The issue is the way one
    uses and interprets documents written by European slavers,
    colonial officials, planters, and so on. Not only are these
    people limited in their knowledge; not only do they interpret
    what they see in ways that are strongly biased in cultural terms;
    but, most importantly, they have an *interest* in purveying
    certain notions of truth because doing so fits their purposes:
    they are, after all, in Africa for a reason.  Moreover, not often
    are there multiple reports so that the reliability of any one
    report can be checked against that of many others.  Or, where
    there are such multiple reports, they tend to be written by
    people with the same limited knowledge, bias, and interests as
    all or most of the other reports.
    
    This is hardly news, but what must be emphasized is the fact that
    research on European history does not require anything like this
    degree of vigilance, of attention to reliability, and this degree
    of skepticism about the reality being depicted in the documents
    
    I raised this point on this list more than a year ago. John
    Thornton answered, reasonably, "But what if we have no other
    sources?"  The answer is given in his own work: treat the sources
    with extreme skepticism, and freely admit that we don't have the
    answers to many important questions; indeed, to most of the truly
    important questions.
    
    This is why I persistently ask, skeptically, whether a given
    traditional European belief about African history is really
    reliable. And: have all of the traditional views on a given
    question been *consciously* reviewed? I ask the same question of
    all historians who work on formerly colonial peoples and places.
    And I ask the same question of historians of Europe itself when
    they evaluate the influence, or non-influence, of non-European
    events and processes on European history.
  •  
  • Jim La Velle pays tribute to James M. Blaut
    
    http://www.uic.edu/depts/paff/uicnews/uic_archives/Archive/2001/20010110123049.html
    January 10, 2001
    By Jim La Velle
    
    GEOGRAPHY, ANTHROPOLOGY PROFESSOR JAMES BLAUT
    James M. Blaut, 73, professor of geography and anthropology, died Nov. 13 in Chicago of complications due to cancer.
    Born in New York City, he was a graduate of the University of Chicago and earned a master's and Ph.D. from Louisiana State University.
    
    An internationally recognized scholar, he made influential contributions to studies of cultural ecology, spatial diffusion, political geography and environmental cognition and map learning in children.
    
    Widely traveled, he conducted extensive field research in peasant agriculture in many countries and had advisory roles with a variety of governments and international agencies.
    
    Before coming to UIC in 1972, he held appointments at the University of Malaya, Yale University, Cornell University, the Caribbean Research Institute, the College of the Virgin Islands, University of Chicago, the University of Puerto Rico and Clark University.
    
    He was named distinguished scholar of the year in 1997 by the Association of American Geographers.
    His publications include five books and more than 80 papers in scholarly journals. At the time of his death he was working on three books.

   

• In the New African, George Pavlu writes on The First Slavers
  • http://www.africasia.com/icpubs/na/nov99/nacs1102.htm
    
    New African
    
    November 1999
    
    The First Slavers
    
    At last, our major series on slavery and reparations can begin. And we are
    going chronologically. Arab slavers were the first, and last, in modern
    times to ship millions of Africans out of the continent as slaves, and
    this is where our series begin. In this piece, George Pavlu and our
    correspondents examine why the Arab slavers preferred more African women
    to men, a situation reversed by the European slavers who shipped out more
    African men than women. Thus, the Arabs too owe a huge debt to Africa and
    people of African descent in reparations.
    
    In his book, Slaves and Slavery, published in 1998, the British writer
    Duncan Clarke defines slavery as "the reduction of fellow human beings to
    the legal status of chattels, allowing them to be bought and sold as
    goods".
    
    This, in essence, is what both the Arabs and Europeans did to Africans, to
    justify the shipping of millions of Africans as slaves to far-away lands
    in Asia (in particular, the Middle East) and the Americas.
    
    "The African slave trade, surely one of the most tragic and disturbing
    episodes in the history of mankind," Clarke writes, "had its origins in
    the intervention of forces from the civilisations that developed in the
    regions of the Mediterranean sea - today's Europe and the Middle East -
    into the arena of the more fragmented civilisations of sub-Saharan Africa.
    
    "Africa became a source of slaves for the cultures of the Mediterranean
    world many centuries before the discovery of the Americas, but it was that
    discovery and the resulting shift in focus towards the Atlantic that
    prompted the culminating explosive growth in slavery with such tragic
    effect."
    
    Slavery, in fact, was a central feature of life in the Mediterranean
    world, especially in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, Greece, Imperial Rome and
    the Islamic societies of the Middle East and North Africa.
    
    "The most important source of slaves in medieval Europe," Clarke's
    research shows, "was the coast of Bosnia on the eastern shores of the
    Adriatic Sea. The word 'slave' and its cognates in most modern European
    languages is itself derived from 'sclavus' meaning 'slav', the ethnic name
    for the inhabitants of this region...
    
    "For various reasons, including the harshness of the terrain and endemic
    warfare among local clans, Bosnia proved the most convenient and
    long-lasting of these slave-supplying regions. Whichever clan gained a
    temporary upper hand was always willing to sell its captured rivals in
    exchange for the goods of the Mediterranean world in the markets of the
    ancient Romanised city of Ragusa (present day Dubrovnik). From there,
    Slavs were shipped as slaves by Venetian merchants, to supply new markets
    in the Islamic world."
    
    Thus, "for the Islamic world," Clarke continues, "Slavs provided the major
    source of slaves in the 250 or so years between the defeat at the battle
    of Poitiers in AD 732 that forced the consolidation of their dramatic
    conquests across North Africa and the Iberian peninsula, cutting back the
    flow of war captives, and the expansion of the import of black Africans
    across the Sahara from around AD 1000."
    
    The trade in slaves ended when the Ottoman Turks conquered the region in
    1463. "The effective closure of the last major source of slaves on the
    European continent," says Clarke, "thus co-incidentally took place at the
    same time as the Portuguese explorations of the West African coast which
    were to open up the second and most devastating route for the exploitation
    of Africans as slaves."
    
    Figures on the Arab slave trade in Africa are hard to come by, but the
    historian Paul Lovejoy estimates that some 9.85 million Africans were
    shipped out as slaves to Arabia and, in small numbers, to the Indian
    sub-continent.
    
    Lovejoy breaks his figures down as follows: Between AD 650 and 1600, an
    average of 5,000 Africans were shipped out by the Arabs. This makes a
    rough total of 7.25 million.
    
    Then, between 1600 and 1800, another 1.4 million Africans were shipped out
    by the Arabs. The 19th century represented the highest point of the
    Arabian trade where 12,000 Africans were shipped out every year. The total
    figure for the 19th century alone was 1.2 million slaves to Arabia.
    
    Thus, in terms of numbers, Arabia's 9.85 million is not far behind the
    conservative estimate of nearly 12 million African victims of the Atlantic
    slave trade. Some African historians, though, reject these figures on the
    grounds that they are too low. They suggest over 50 million Africans were
    shipped out during the Atlantic trade alone.
    
    According to Lovejoy, another 4.1 million Africans were shipped across the
    Red Sea to the Persian Gulf and India. "This trade also, with the notable
    exception of some Portuguese involvement in the area of Mozambique, and of
    18th and 19th century French exports to islands under their control in the
    Indian Ocean, was largely conducted by Muslims," adds Duncan Clarke.
    
    Throughout the 19th century, the Omani Arab rulers of Zanzibar shipped
    hundreds of thousands of African slaves to work on clove plantations on
    the island. It was this trade that gave Europe and America so much
    satisfaction, after abolishing their own trade in African slaves, to
    highlight the wickedness of the Arab slavers who continued to enslave
    Africans well into the first decades of the 20th century. Even to this
    day, Arab slavers are still at work in Sudan and Mauritania, buying and
    selling black Africans.
    
    David Livingstone, the British missionary/traveller/explorer was so upset
    by the way the Arabs treated their African slaves that he wrote back home
    in 1870:
    
    "In less than I take to talk about it, these unfortunate creatures - 84 of
    them, wended their way into the village where we were. Some of them, the
    eldest, were women from 20 to 22 years of age, and there were youths from
    18 to 19, but the large majority was made up of boys and girls from 7
    years to 14 or 15 years of age.
    
    "A more terrible scene than these men, women and children, I do not think
    I ever came across. To say that they were emaciated would not give you an
    idea of what human beings can undergo under certain circumstances.
    
    "Each of them had his neck in a large forked stick, weighing from 30 to 40
    pounds, and five or six feet long, cut with a fork at the end of it where
    the branches of a tree spread out.
    
    "The women were tethered with bark thongs, which are, of all things, the
    most cruel to be tied with. Of course they are soft and supple when first
    striped off the trees, but a few hours in the sun make them about as hard
    as the iron round packing-cases. The little children were fastened by
    thongs to their mothers.
    
    "As we passed along the path which these slaves had travelled, I was shown
    a spot in the bushes where a poor woman the day before, unable to keep on
    the march, and likely to hinder it, was cut down by the axe of one of
    these slave drivers.
    
    "We went on further and were shown a place where a child lay. It had been
    recently born, and its mother was unable to carry it from debility and
    exhaustion; so the slave trader had taken this little infant by its feet
    and dashed its brains out against one of the trees and thrown it in
    there."
    
    Such was the brutality meted out to the Africans by the Arabs. Like the
    Atlantic trade, the Arabian trade's "middle passage" was equally as
    horrible and terrifying. The "middle passage" describes the harrowing
    journey lasting several months from Africa's west coast to the Americas
    during which millions of Africans, packed like sardines in the slave
    ships, died of thirst, hunger, rough seas, and sometimes from the sheer
    brutality inflicted by the European slavers.
    
    In the Arabian trade, the trudge across the Sahara, in leg and neck
    chains, and as Livingstone describes above, necks in large forked sticks
    and hands tied with bark thongs, was particularly harsh on the African
    slaves.
    
    Says Duncan Clarke: "The hardships of these long marches across the desert
    were considerable, and much later travellers reported that the routes were
    lined with the parched skeletons of those who succumbed to exhaustion and
    thirst along the way."
    
    The Arab slavers did not only march their African captives to Arabia, they
    also sometimes sold them to European slavers.
    
    In modern times, the popular image of African slavery springs from the
    vision of a tormented male suffering under the lash of unceasing labour on
    some "New World" sugar plantation. Yet the real face of servitude finds
    its focus in the forced migration of millions of girls and young women
    across the Sahara and the Horn of Africa into the institutions of Islamic
    concubinage.
    
    While in the European "New World", the measure of a man's stature was
    mapped out and calibrated on the physical dimensions of empire built upon
    the sinews of forced masculine labour, in the Islamic Orient wealth was a
    reflection of prestige, young girls the vessel of male hubris, the mats of
    male pleasure-ground, the malleable material to be shaped to the master's
    will.
    
    Thus, women slaves in the Arab world were often turned into concubines
    living in harems, and rarely as wives, their children becoming free. A
    large number of male slaves and young boys were castrated and turned into
    eunuchs who kept watch over the harems. Castration was a particularly
    brutal operation with a survival rate of only 10%.
    
    "The combined effect of all these factors," says Duncan Clarke, "was a
    steady demand for slaves throughout the Islamic world, which had to be met
    from wars, raids or purchases along the borders with non-Islamic regions.
    Although some of these slaves came from Russia, the Balkans and central
    Asia, the continuing expansion of Islamic regimes in sub-Saharan Africa
    made black Africans, the major source."
    
    So invasive was the practice of slavery into the economic, political,
    demographic, cultural, social and religious life of Africa and persisted
    for so many centuries, that while its effects varied both geographically
    and temporally in intensity, slavery out-distances in scale and scope any
    single or combination of disasters - natural or man-made - which descended
    upon the continent.
    
    Slavery unquestionably checked population growth in Africa and
    consequentially placed tremendous pressure upon gender and marital
    relationships during the three critical centuries of European expansion to
    global domination.
    
    In this sense, the feminine-oriented Arab slave trade, though neither
    motivated nor executed with economic benefits as prime objective, caused
    far greater demographic damage and consequently greater economic decline,
    with its excessive poaching of the reproductive potential of the harvested
    areas.
    
    No people are blank slates upon which can be inscribed untold miseries and
    expect no account thereof. The Arab slave trade began long before the
    Islamic conquest of Africa, remained at relatively low level compared to
    the Atlantic slave trade and did not become illegal or abolished, and was
    maintained till well after the colonisation of Africa. The Arabian trade
    was outlawed in Ethiopia only in 1935 in order to gain international
    support against the Italian invasion.
    
    In the Atlantic trade, the slaves came predominantly from Africa's west
    coast with a male/female ratio of two-to-one. In the Arabian trade, the
    slaves were exclusively from the Savannah and the Horn of Africa, and
    favoured females over males at a ratio nearing three-to-one.
    
    When slavery in the Black Sea area (the traditional source of the best
    grade female slaves for the Arab market) dried up, it triggered an even
    greater demand for Ethiopian "red" slaves, in particular the Galla and
    Oromo on account of their unquestioned beauty and willing sexual
    temperament.
    
    And while the Europeans paid a higher price for male slaves than females,
    the reverse was the case with the Arabs. Moreover, while the European/New
    World slavers profited mainly from male labour, the Arabs saw profit in
    sexual satisfaction/reproductive potential. (Offspring of the union
    between Islamic master and female slave was born free, out of respect of
    the child's Islamic paternity. Any offspring of the Atlantic trade were
    born into slavery).
    
    "The laws of Islam," as the historian Hugh Thomas attests, "were in some
    ways more benign in respect of slavery than were those of Rome. Slaves
    were not to be treated as if they were animals. Slaves and freemen were
    equal from the point of view of God. The master did not have power of life
    and death over his slave property."
    
    But to the Africans shipped across the Red Sea, the "benign" Islamic laws
    provided little comfort - they were still slaves of Islamic masters who
    had unfettered sexual access to them (if they were female) or castrated
    and turned into eunuchs (if they were men).
    
    The upshot of this gender profile of the respective slave-classes in the
    Atlantic/New World and the Arab/Oriental world explains the large and
    visible population of African origin in the New World where sexual
    relations between white and black was the exception while in the Arab
    world where miscegenation was the practice, the slave trade has left few
    visible traces.
    
    So where are the descendants of the African slaves sent to Arabia/Orient?
    There are no large concentrations of them, anywhere in the Middle East or
    Asia.
    
    Five years ago, a British TV documentary showed how poorly the descendants
    of African slaves in Pakistan are treated by the authorities. The racial
    discrimination was so bad that one of the African descendants recounted on
    camera how, even in sport, they were not picked to represent Pakistan at
    national and international levels no matter how good they were.
    
    The demographic effects of Arabian slavery on the source population (those
    left behind) cannot be overlooked, and specifically when considering the
    palpable effects on African fertility as a consequence of the grossly
    reduced female numbers.
    
    To ensure survival, the Africans in the harvested areas adopted a variety
    of social measures, which were in practice as extreme as the circumstances
    called for. These revolved principally around the sexual purity of the
    population's remaining female reproductive stock, as well as accelerating
    the female's reproductive capacity.
    
    Though the number of female slaves exported per annum from the Savannah
    and the Horn was far smaller than the numbers taken from the west coast in
    the Atlantic trade, the proportionate impact on the remaining at-brink
    Savanna/Horn populations was far more severe.
    
    The Arabian trade reached a total of perhaps 5-8% of the source
    populations - and as mentioned earlier - as the proportion of females
    harvested was exceptionally high, this resulted in a massive surplus of
    males in the non-harvested population. Consequently the area experienced
    demographic stagnation bordering decline.
    
    In 1600, the black African population was some 50 million - about 30% of
    the combined population of the New World, Europe, Middle East and North
    Africa. By 1800, the population had fallen to 20% of the total. In 1900,
    at the end of the slave trade, Africa's population had fallen yet further
    to just over 10% of the total - the population now so collapsed as to
    negatively affect the continent's labour-intensive agricultural output.
    
    In effect, while the populations of Europe and Asia increased year on
    year, Africa's population declined dramatically due to the excessive
    poaching by the slavers, both Arab and European.
    
    In Arabia, the slave class (principally female), unlike the New World
    slave class, could never maintain itself as a distinct social entity -
    principally because of miscegenation. This created an even greater demand
    for more and more new female slaves, and coupled with the frequent natural
    disasters of drought and famine in the Savannah/Horn, led many African
    families to offer their young girls into slavery as a last hope of
    survival. There are many stories of long lines of hundreds of girls,
    mainly Oromos from Ethiopia, trudging across the Horn towards the Red Sea
    seeking enslavement.
    
    Deprived of ideology, ritual, and the African rite of passage to adulthood
    and social membership, female slaves were uncommonly vulnerable to
    conversion to Islam (the benefits of manumission aside). Manumission
    describes a child born of a female slave and a free Islamic father and is
    thus born free.
    
    For the population remaining in Africa, it is in order to embark on some
    speculation as to what changes the trauma of slavery may have wrought on
    African thought. The experience of sudden turn of fate (a common
    experience when confronted by the ever-present threat of slavers) tended
    to systematically undermine any efforts at long-term planning beyond the
    constant need to replace lost members.
    
    It is a mistake to equate the bare survival of Africa with cultural or
    social or economic stagnation, for the slave trade visited such a panoply
    of tragically interconnected disasters into the lives of every African for
    centuries, that they have worked their way into the very "racial memory"
    of the continent and its people, particularly females, that only with time
    and kindness can it be expunged from the psyche of Africa.
    
    As one commentator puts it: "Could it be true that the corrosive effects
    of four centuries of commerce in humans, with its temptation, its in-built
    opportunism, its reduction of humans to a cash value, its cycles of
    revenge and its inevitable physical brutality, have built lasting flaws
    into African pattern of thought and action?"
    
    Copyright (c) IC Publications Limited 1999. All rights reserved.

  
  

• Robert Whaples  reviews A Historical Guide to World Slavery by Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. (short extract)

  • Published by EH.NET (July, 1999) 
    Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, eds.  _  A Historical Guide to World Slavery_.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1998.  xxiv + 429 pp.  Bibliographical references and index.  $75.00 (cloth), ISBN  0-19-512091-4.
    Reviewed for EH.Net by Robert Whaples <whaples@wfu.edu>, Department of Economics, Wake Forest University 
    
    Seymour Drescher (University of Pittsburgh) and Stanley Engerman (University of Rochester) have assembled a stellar cast which has written an exceptionally useful reference book.  The goal of the nearly one hundred contributors to _A Historical Guide to World Slavery_ is to bring slavery into a "worldwide and cross-cultural focus."  The entries in this volume do this very well.  They will be useful to students and scholars alike, as they provide both an accessible overview of the complexities of the subject and a starting point for further research.  The authors' collective ability to be simultaneously concise and informative is striking. . .  (continues)
    
    Full review: http://www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/0174.shtml

   

  •  

  •  
• Sue Peabody's  slavery website.

  • Prof. Sue Peabody (Washington State University Vancouver) maintains a website of links to various internet resources dealing with slavery. It is organized geographically with a U.S. bias (North America and the World) and by genre (Academic Centers; Documents, Narratives, Texts; Public History: Media, Museums and Sites): http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/slave.htm

   

• AfricaBib website description and link

  • [Davis Bullwinkle] AfricaBib website description and link.
    H-NET List for African History and Culture
    [H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
    27-04-99
    Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999
    From: Davis Bullwinkle
    <dabullwinkle@ualr.edu>
    WWW.AfricaBib.Org
     
    AfricaBib was created in 1999 as a way to freely disseminate
    information from two African studies databases as well as
    information on Africa from other sources.
     
    The databases have been created and are maintained by
    Davis Bullwinkle who is the director of the IEA Research Library,
    at the Institute for Economic Advancement (IEA) at the
    University of Arkansas-Little Rock, in Little Rock, Arkansas
    in the United States.
     
    The web site presently contains the following:
     
    Africana Periodical Literature Bibliographic Database
     
    This work was originally begun in September of 1974 as
    an effort to index all the issues of each periodical/journal
    title and place them all in one source.
     
    This English language database indexes over 36,000
    articles from over 310 English language and multi-lingual journals
    and periodicals that specialize in African Studies or
    consistently cover the African continent. The titles were
    originally chosen from the library at California State
    University-Chico and that number were later expanded by
    using materials from Northwestern University and other
    major university libraries as well as the Library of Congress.
    Each title is indexed from its first day of publication to
    the present or, either its date of ceasing or a date where
    the journal or periodical no longer covered Africa on a
    regular basis. In only in a few cases were titles dropped
    due to the difficulty in obtaining copies or irregularities
    in the journal's publishing schedule.
     
    Of the over 310 journals and periodicals indexed, more
    than half have ceased being published. Until the mid-1960's few
    Africana journals were indexed in major indexing tools.
     
    This work hopes to fill the gap by indexing Africana materials
    from the mid-nineteenth century to today all in one index.
     
    A title list of all journals and periodicals indexed,
    including the years the journals or periodicals were
    published and indexed is included by a link from the front
    page of this database.
     
    The titles indexed in this database represent Africana
    materials published in from over 22 nations within North
    America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
     
    Africana Women's Database
     
    This English language database contains over 23,000
    citations from 1986 to current. The database indexes six
    types of materials: books and government documents;
    articles appearing in edited books; periodical and journal articles;
    Masters theses and Ph.D. dissertations as well as a few
    B.A.theses and honors papers; conference papers; and
    videocassettes.
     
    This database is the outgrowth of a three volume work
    published in 1989 by Greenwood Press that indexed
    materials on African Women published during the International
    Women's Decade, 1975-1985.
     
    The database indexes everything the compiler can find
    published in English about African women. If you know of
    any materials that are not in this index and deserve to be
    included you can contact Davis Bullwinkle at
    dabullwinkle@ualr.edu or at either 501 569-8521 or 501
    666-9048.
     
    The database indexes conference papers from the
    following conferences:
     
    African Literature Association
    African Studies Association
    American Anthropological Association
    Cairo Demographic Centre
    Canadian Association of African Studies
    International AIDS Conference
    Middle East Studies Association
    Population Association of America

   

• Chap Kusimba reflects on Africa's Meaning to Non-Africans
  • 
    H-NET List for African History and Culture [H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
    
    Date:   Fri, 19 Nov 1999
    From:   Chap Kusimba <kusimba@fmppr.fmnh.org>
    
     Africa's Meaning to Non-Africans
    
    By Chapurukha M. Kusimba
    Bennet Bronson Anthropology Department, The Field Museum
    
    Striking contradictions exist in the way we see Africa's
    role in the past and present world.  Few people still
    question that eastern and southern Africa were the
    birthplace of the modern human lineage, and were indeed the
    only home known to our ancestors until about a million years
    ago.  Most specialists accept that when modern humans first
    left Africa for other continents, they carried a good deal
    of culture with them when .  But in spite of this,
    non-Africans tend to devalue both ancient and recent African
    contributions to the world.
    
    Down through about 10,000 BC, the greatest of known African
    contributions was its advanced stone tool technologies.
    Most innovations in the making of stone knives and spears
    either first occurred in Africa and spread to Eurasia or
    occurred at more or less the same time in Africa as in the
    rest of the Old World.
    
    After 10,000 BC, when humans began to experiment with
    raising food plants and animals, and hence with settled
    village life and everything that followed from that, the
    technological links between Africa and Eurasia continued to
    be close.  This was especially true in the realm of
    agriculture.  While the Egyptians and other north Africans
    were taming a wide range of animals and borrowing food
    plants from West Asia, Africans further south were
    domesticating numerous crops, including sorghum, one kind of
    rice, two kinds of millet, several legumes, several kinds of
    yams, coffee, oil palm and possibly watermelon.  They sent
    several of these, including sorghum and both Eleusine and
    Pennisetum millet, to Eurasia, and in turn received
    domesticated animals, wheat, barley, bananas and more kinds
    of yams.  The movement of food species into and out of
    Africa, even before the development of cities or metal
    technology, testifies to the great antiquity of economic
    links between Africa and the rest of the world.
    
    Peoples too continued to move into and out of Africa.
    Genetic and linguistic evidence shows that there was a
    constant flow of population between East and Northeast
    Africa on the one hand, and the Middle East, India, and
    southern Europe on the other hand.  Historical linguists
    maintain that the Semitic languages - the ancestors of
    Arabic, Hebrew, Assyrian, etc.- originated in central
    Africa.  So did the language of ancient Egypt.
    
    Egypt, of course, was centrally involved with many famous
    achievements of the ancient world.  Most of us are aware
    that ancient Egyptian civilization is now thought to be as
    old as Middle Eastern civilization with regard to such key
    "inventions" as writing, monumental architecture, kings,
    written laws, and bureaucrats.  We may be less aware,
    however, that ancient Egypt was in close and almost constant
    contact with regions farther south.  Extremists on both
    sides of the "Black Cleopatra" controversy have tended to
    ignore the fact that throughout Egyptian history, the vast
    southern watershed of the Nile routinely supplied Egypt not
    only with fertility-bringing floods but also with manpower -
    workers, entertainers, soldiers and ruling dynasties.  Much
    of what went south from Egypt in return has vanished.  One
    important export to the south, however, survives:  Coptic
    Christianity with its Egyptian/Middle Eastern-inspired art,
    writing, and architecture. The rock churches of Lalibela in
    Ethiopia bear witness to the intensity of early cultural
    interchange between the northern Nile Valley and parts of
    Sub-Saharan Africa.
    
    Trade relationships between the Sub-Saharan region and the
    rest of the world became routine at least two thousand years
    ago.  The Egyptians and Carthaginians conducted overland
    trade in the early and middle first millennium B.C. As early
    as the first century A.D., Africa's trade relationships with
    Eurasia began to be controlled by growing state societies
    and significantly contributed to bi-directional biological
    and technical transfers in the Old World.  Improvements in
    ships and the introduction of the camel make it possible to
    trade across the Indian ocean with East Africa and across
    the Sahara with West Africa.  Gold, salt, ivory, hides, and
    spices were typical commodities in this commerce between
    North and South.
    
    In Northeast Africa, important urban centers including the
    kingdoms of Kush and Axum came into being at this period,
    which culminated during the fifth century AD with Ethiopia's
    colonization of South Arabia.  In eastern and southern
    Africa, long-distance trade stimulated the growth of cities
    along the East African coast and in the interior, centered
    around the Shona kingdoms of Dzimbahwe.  In West Africa, the
    trans-Saharan caravan trade led to the rise of a series of
    large, highly centralized kingdoms, including Ghana, Mali,
    and Songhai.  One sub-Saharan African group, the Almoravids
    of the upper Niger area, expanded their power northward
    beyond the desert in the twelfth century.  Conquering first
    Morocco and then Spain, they established one of the most
    brilliant dynasties of the Islamic Middle Ages.
    
    Turning to modern times, many important cultural impacts of
    Africa have been made by Africans in the Diaspora.
    Innovations made by New World Africans in music, the
    sciences, medicine, and architecture are now recognized as
    major elements in our present world cultural heritage.  Non-
    Diaspora Africans continue making contributions in music,
    literature, and sculpture.
    
    But then why did a negative image of African culture emerge
    and persist even in parts of the world where there has been
    little or no direct contact with African peoples?
    
    We think there are several reasons.
    
    First, slavery.  Because some parts of Africa were populous,
    poor, and militarily weak, they became major suppliers of
    slaves to other continents.  In Christian Europe and the
    Americas, though not necessarily in Islamic countries,
    slaves were low in status and some of this low status rubbed
    off on Africans who were by no means slaves.
    
    A second reason for negative images of Africa: its enforced
    role as a supplier only of raw materials.  As European
    imperialism developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, Africa
    shifted from being an equal trading partner to being a
    continent of mines and exploitable forests and plains,
    yielding much of the world's ivory, gold, platinum,
    diamonds, chromium, manganese, bauxite, uranium, and so
    forth.  With these being exported in raw, unprocessed form,
    the profits and prestige of manufacturing went to peoples of
    other continents.  In the eyes of Europeans, North Americans
    and East Asians for whom factories were close to the essence
    of civilization, Africa lost prestige because it was seen as
    manufacturing nothing from its own resources.  Few of those
    observers took into account the fact that neither the
    colonial nor post-colonial systems allowed Africans to set
    up plants for converting raw materials into consumer
    products.
    
    A third reason: climatological chauvinism on the part of
    East Asians and Westerners.  Both groups lived in chilly
    places, had light-colored skins, and wore lots of clothes.
    So it was quite natural for them to conclude that partial
    nudity was immoral, that dark-skinned people were inferior,
    and that warm climates encouraged laziness, messiness, and
    generally undisciplined attitudes.  In the opinion of
    Europeans, Africa and other tropical regions shared another
    "uncivilized" trait: their peoples took too many baths.
    Europeans, by contrast, bathed infrequently and tended to
    regard this along with their heavy clothes as symbols of
    their more civilized status.
    
    A fourth reason: ignorance.  Outsiders of the colonial
    period consistently failed to recognize the remarkable
    qualities of traditional African technologies and to
    appreciate their suitability for sustainable development.
    Western agricultural specialists, for instance, tried hard
    to introduce European-style methods, crops and breeds in
    spite of the fact that traditional African farming methods
    were often as productive as those of Europe and far better
    suited to tropical environments.  None of these reasons --
    former slavery, persisting colonial production patterns,
    climatological prejudice, or simple ignorance -- fully
    account for Africa's negative image, especially in regions
    like the Far East which had little historical contact with
    Africa.  And yet that negativism persists, and has serious
    consequences.  One such consequence has been an irrational
    disinterest in traditional African agriculture and
    stockbreeding. Western agricultural experts have spent more
    than a century trying to persuade Africans to raise European
    and American breeds of cattle, even though these tend to do
    poorly under African conditions.  It is only quite recently
    that modern breeders have begun looking at African cattle
    not as primitive but as the products of hundreds of
    generations of carefully controlled, patient and intelligent
    selection for desirable qualities.  One of the first results
    of this new attitude has been the introduction of the Tuli
    breed, originally from Zimbabwe, into the United States.
    With meat quality as good as Angus steers, an exceptionally
    docile nature, and the ability to thrive in spite of extreme
    heat and drought, the Tuli may replace many of the breeds
    that are currently popular with American cattle ranchers.
    
    Another consequence is the disappearance of much of the
    well-adapted material culture of traditional Africa.  For
    instance, African communities had for several millennia
    excellent earthenware industries that were well adapted to
    the functional and symbolic requirements of those
    communities, and most of which are still relevant to present
    day populations.  Yet, today many African nations import, at
    great expense, ceramics of a far less relevant range of
    shapes at far higher expenses while the indigenous industry
    has collapsed.  The negative effects are not only economic
    but cultural, leading to a dilution of tradition and a loss
    of design skills on the level of the individual
    craftsperson.
    
    Yet another consequence is the loss of what has been learned
    over the centuries about environmentally adapted
    architecture and settlement planning.  Beautiful and elegant
    old houses constructed of indigenous materials are being
    allowed to decay and collapse centuries before their working
    life is over.  Some are converted to new uses, but their
    fabric is remolded with an insensitivity to the ecological
    and climatic setting.  On the other hand, modern structures
    constructed with imported materials are problematic.  Filthy
    walls, poor designs, bad sewage systems, overgrown grounds,
    leaking roofs, and other appalling facilities contribute to
    the overall impression that mega-slums are indeed in the
    making in Africa.
    
    We could cite many more unfortunate effects of negative
    attitudes toward Africa and African achievement.  But the
    point is made.  While many communities around the world may
    be aware of Africa's important contributions to their
    cultural and historical heritage in the distant past, they
    ignore the potential of those contributions in the present
    and future.  The solution, we think, is education, and that
    has to be done not only by non-Africans and Americans and
    Europeans of African ancestry but by Africans themselves.
    When Africans can confidently and knowledgeably offer their
    heritage as solutions to the problems of other continents,
    Africa's historical place in the modern world community will
    become a reality.
    
    "Friendship is a sentiment that cultivates itself."
    

• Eddie Becker's Chronology on the History of Slavery and Racism (extracts)
  • Compiled from Archive, library and Internet source documentation, this timeline on Slavery and in part the History of Racism, has been used to guide the direction of independent research into the history of enslaved Americans of African descent at historic sites located at the National Zoo, in Washington, DC. Hopefully, this compilation of American history will help others who undertake similar tasks.
    
    This project has been conducted totally independently from research conducted by the Office of Architectural History and Preservation at the Smithsonian and the National Zoo. Visit the Holt House Web Site for periodic updates. Be sure to go to the bottom of the page and hit "Contents" to enter. This research was compiled by Eddie Becker who will be happy to give advice on similar undertakings.
    Citation information and credit: (Chronology on the History of Slavery, Compiled by Eddie Becker 1999, see on line at http://innercity.org/holt/slavechron.html)
    
    The Chronology is broken up into three parts:

    1619 - 1789

    1790 to 1829

    1830 - the end

  • 
    For pre-17th century timeline see Cora Agatucci's African Timeline.
    
    Chronology Of The History Of Slavery: 1619-1789
    
    The transatlantic slave trade produced one of the largest forced migrations in history. From the early 16th to the mid-19th centuries, between 10 million and 11 million Africans were taken from their homes, herded onto ships where they were sometimes so tightly packed that they could barely move, and sent to a strange new land. Since others died before boarding the ships, Africa's loss of population was even greater. ("Slavery in the United States," Microsoft Encarta 98 Encyclopedia. Microsoft Corporation.)
    
    Projected Exports Of That Portion Of The French And English Slave Trade Having Identifiable Region Of Coast Origin In Africa, 1711-1810
    
  • Senegambia (Senegal-Gambia)* 5.8%
  • Sierra Leone 3.4%
  • Windward Coast (Ivory Coast)* 12.1%
  • Gold Coast (Ghana)* 14.4%
  • Bight of Benin (Nigeria)* 14.5
  • Bight of Biafra (Nigeria)* 25.1%
  • Central and Southeast Africa (Cameroon- N.Angola)* 24.7%
    
  • * The countries in parentheses are rough approximations to help you find the location on a modern map.
    
  • "Were these people called by that name during that time in that place?" Excluding some nomadic and semi-nomadic groups
    
  • Senegambia (Senegal-Gambia): Wolof, Mandingo, Malinke, Bambara, Papel, Limba, Bola, Balante, Serer, Fula, Tucolor
  • Sierra Leone: Temne, Mende, Kisi, Goree, Kru.
  • Windward Coast (Ivory Coast) (incl. Liberia): Baoule, Vai, De, Gola (Gullah), Bassa, Grebo.
  • Gold Coast (Ghana): Ewe, Ga, Fante, Ashante, Twi, Brong
  • Bight Of Benin & Bight Of Biafra Combined (sorry): Yoruba, Nupe, Benin, Dahomean (Fon), Edo-Bini, Allada, Efik, Ibibio, Ijaw, Ibani,Igbo(Calabar)
  • Central & Southeast Africa: BaKongo, MaLimbo, Ndungo, BaMbo, BaLimbe, BaDongo, Luba, Loanga, Ovimbundu, Cabinda, Pembe, Imbangala, Mbundu, BaNdulunda
    
  • Please send comments (see web page below) on whether the following groups should be included as a "Ancestral group" of African Americans, and in what region: Fulani, Tuareg, Dialonke, Massina, Dogon, Songhay, Jekri, Jukun, Domaa, Tallensi, Mossi, Nzima, Akwamu, Egba, Fang, and Ge. (Compiled by Kwame Bandele from information in P.D. Curtin's book, "Atlantic Slave Trade" p. 221).
    
    In the 1700s the coasts of West Africa had three main divisions controlled by Europeans in their effort to monopolize the slave trade. The three divisions were Senegambia, Upper Guinea and Lower Guinea.
    
    Senegambia's two navigable rivers, the Senegal and the Gambia, were controlled by the French and the English, respectively. The West Africans who became slaves from the Senegambia included the Fula, Wolof, Serer, Felup, and the Mandingo.
    
    Upper Guinea had a two thousand miles coastline from the Gambia south and east to the Bight of Biafra. This coastline was also designated the Windward Coast because of the heavy winds on the shore. The West Africans who became slaves from the Upper Gambia included the Baga and Susu from French Guinea, the Chamba from Sierra Leone, the Krumen from the Grain Coast, and the Fanti and the Ashanti from the Gold Coast, commonly referred to today as Ghana. East of the Volta River was the Slave Coast which was so named because the slave trade was at its height there since the African kings (Slattees) permitted Europeans to compete equally for Africans to become slaves. Those West Africans who became slaves from this region included Yoruban, Ewe, Dahoman, Ibo, Ibibio, and the Efik.
    
    Lower Guinea had fifteen hundred miles of coastline from Calabar to the southern desert. The West Africans who became slaves from this region were all Bantus. The trading of Africans from the West Coast provided an economic boon for the Europeans. The trading of Africans from the West Coast produced the heinous Middle passage. The trading of Africans from the West Coast produced the African American! (Connections: A Culturally Historical Prospective of West African to African American, by Kelvin Tarrance, Revised: May 3, 1996)
    
    The slave trade from Africa is said to have uprooted as many as 20 million people from their homes and brought them to the Americas. Slavery had existed as a human institution for centuries, but the slaves were usually captives taken in war or members of the lowest class in a society. The black African slave trade, by contrast, was a major economic enterprise. It made the traders rich and brought an abundant labor supply to the islands of the Caribbean and to the American Colonies. (Compton's Encyclopedia Online )
    
    The mortality rate among these new slaves ran very high. It is estimated that some five percent died in Africa on the way to the coast, another thirteen percent in transit to the West Indies, and still another thirty percent during the three-month seasoning period in the West Indies. This meant that about fifty percent of those originally captured in Africa died either in transit or while being prepared for servitude. Even this statistic, harsh as it is, does not tell the whole story of the human cost involved in the slave trade. Most slaves were captured in the course of warfare, and many more Africans were killed in the course of this combat. The total number of deaths, then, ran much higher than those killed en route. Many Africans became casualty statistics, directly or indirectly, because of the slave trade. Beyond this, there was the untold human sorrow and misery borne by the friends and relatives of those Africans who were torn away from home and loved ones and were never seen again. (Norman Coombs, The Immigrant Heritage of America, Twayne Press, 1972. Chapter 2 The Human Market, The Slave Trade)
    
    It was obvious, however, that the victims of the modern slave trade could not be said to have been acquired directly in war. They had been purchased from African rulers who had seized them in raids whose only purpose had been to acquire this valuable human commodity for the insatiable European market. To this, the advocates of the trade replied by claiming that the Africans purchased by the traders had originally been taken prisoner in "just" wars between Africans. The speciousness of this argument was evident from the beginning. But most slavers accepted what they claimed were African assurances that their human merchandise had indeed been "saved" in a just war, on the principle that it is not up to the purchaser to discover if the goods he is buying have been acquired legitimately or not. In this way slavery remained linked, throughout its 300-year history, to internecine African warfare. Thomas seems to imply that Africans, since they were involved in the trade, must take some measure of the blame for it. This can hardly be denied. What Thomas overlooks, though, is the degree to which the European slave trade contributed to the situation from which it benefited. The abolitionists had always been fully aware of the possible impact of the trade upon Africa. "The slave trade," bewailed Granville Sharp, one of the earliest of the English abolitionists, in 1776, "preyed upon the ignorance and brutality of unenlightened nations, who are encouraged to war with each other for this very purpose." The consequences of this for the continent have only just begun to be examined, but there is sufficient evidence to suggest that at least some of the horrors that modern African rulers continue to inflict upon their peoples, and that African states continue to inflict upon one another, can be linked not only to the disastrous process of de-colonization, but also to the long experience of the European slave trade. Modern slavers were faced with a further problem: religion. (Anthony Pagden http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/SlaveTrade The Slave Trade, Review of Hugh Thomas' Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The New Republic; 12-22-1997)
    
    Africans cooperated with Europeans in the slave trade, and some slaves transported to America were already of the slave class. But most slaves were simply hostages of the trade, and very few were slaves before. A set of political and military circumstances that the Portuguese, the Dutch, and other Europeans imposed on the West Africans forced many African kingdoms to cooperate with the slave trade. Stronger nations had driven many coastal kingdoms from the interior before the arrival of the Europeans. Yet with the coming of European tools and weaponry as payment for African slaves, these coastal kingdoms found themselves in power positions and began slave-raiding expeditions against their former enemies. European slave traders used these rivalries to increase tensions among the African kingdoms for their own mercenary purposes. By fomenting war between kingdoms and by introducing superior arms to those cooperating with the trade, the Europeans obligated many unwilling kingdoms to collaborate with them or face enslavement themselves--raid or be raided. The "most abominable aspect of the slave trade, was fueled by the idea that Africans, even children, were better off Christianized under a system of European slavery than left in Africa amid tribal wars, famines and paganism" (p. 218). (Willie F. Page. _The Dutch Triangle: The Netherlands and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1621-1664_. Studies in African American History and Culture. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. xxxv + 262 pp. Bibliographical references and index. $66.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8153-2881-8. Reviewed for H-Review by Dennis R. Hidalgo, Central Michigan University)
    
    Essay argues that slavery existed and sometimes flourished in Africa before the transatlantic slave trade, but neither the African continent nor persons of African origin were as prominent in the world of slaveholding as they would later become. Second, the capture and sale of slaves across the Atlantic between 1450 and 1850 encouraged expansion and repeated transformation of slavery within Africa, to the point that systems of slavery became central to societies all across the continent. Third, even after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade (largely accomplished by 1850) and the European conquest of Africa (mostly by 1900), millions of persons remained in slavery in Africa as late as 1930. (For full reading see Slavery in Africa, Microsoft, Encarta, Africana content, 1999 Microsoft Corporation)
     
    
    Height of Atlantic Slave Trade:
    
    Between the years 1650 and 1900, historians estimate that at least 28 million Africans were forcibly removed from central and western Africa as slaves (but the numbers involved are controversial). A human catastrophe for Africa, the world African Slave Trade was truly a "Holocaust."
    
    THE HOLOCAUST:
  • Muslim traders exported as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, to the Middle East, and to North Africa. African slave exports via the Red Sea, trans-Sahara, and East Africa/Indian Ocean to other parts of the world between 1500-1900 totaled at least 5 million Africans sent into bondage.
     
    Between 1450 and 1850, at least 12 million Africans were shipped from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean--the notorious Middle Passage"-- primarily to colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies.. 80% of these kidnapped Africans (or at least 7 million) were exported during the 18th century, with a mortality rate of probably 10-20% on the ships en route for the Americas.
     
    Unknown numbers (probably at least 4 million) of Africans died in slave wars and forced marches before being shipped. Within central Africa itself, the slave trade precipitated migrations: coastal tribes fled slave-raiding parties and captured slaves were redistributed to different regions in Africa.
     
    African slave trade and slave labor transformed the world. In Africa, slave trade stimulated the expansion of powerful West African kingdoms. In the Islamic world, African slave labor on plantations, in seaports, and within families expanded the commerce and trade of the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. In the Americas, slave labor became the key component in trans-Atlantic agriculture and commerce supporting the booming capitalist economy of the 17th and 18th centuries, with the greatest demand in the Americas coming from Brazil and the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.
    (Cora Agatucci's African Timeline, Central Oregon Community College, )
    
    Throughout the first half of 18th century, France and England battled for control of the Guinea Coast. In Lower Guinea, the British`s main adversary was the Dutch. But when the Dutch Company was liquidated, the British soon gained control of the entire Ivory, Grain, and Gold Coasts. France, Britain's main adversary in Upper Guinea, soon lost interest because of lack of profits. The sparsely populated Upper Guinea coast did not provide enough slaves. In addition, interior ethnic groups were very hostile to European influence. By the mid-18th century, Britain had full control of West African trade. In addition, the British won the Assiento, the sole license to ship black slaves from Africa to Spanish controlled territories in America, in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. British dominance in the slave trade began a new period of change in the European/African relationship. The English would begin to explore, conquer and rule African peoples. The Age of Trade shifted into the Age of Colonization.(Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade 1450-1750 ThinkQuest )
    
    Slavery
    
    By Clavin Gee, Kristin Lundbom, Thomas Stickler
    
    Where Slaves Were Found
    
    Slaves of the 18th century were found predominantly in the Western Atlantic side of Africa and were a continuance of the transatlantic slave trade that began in the 15th century, following the discovery of the New World. The majority of the more than 9 million Africans were enslaved though primitive kidnapping raids. These slave raids involved regions covering the basins of the Nile and Congo and areas within the great African Lakes. Beginning with the Dutch and Portuguese, then by British, French and less extensively the Danes and Swedes, slaves were continually shipped to the New World. The population of slaves imported during 1680 to 1780 for the British colonies and West Indies amounted to over 2 million. Another staggering figure indicates that for the single year of 1790, there was an estimated 75,000 slaves imported to the New World: 38,000 in British ships, 20,000 in French, 4,000 in Dutch, 2,000 in Polish, and 10,000 in Portuguese.
    
    Who the Slaves Were
    
    Most widely known slave societies were those of the circum-Caribbean world. When sugar plantations moved from the West Indies English took the African slaves with them. Initially the English did really on indentured servants from England, but because of change of laws African slaves replaced English indentured servants (Encyclopedia Britannica vol 27, 288).
    
    African rulers themselves were responsible for the slave deportation to Europe and often times even "encouraged sea captains to come to their port" (EB vol 27, 289). Slavery in England was officially abolished in 1772, with the Sommerset case which stated "Any slave by the act of walking on English soil became free" (EB vol 27, 290). Furthermore, by the 1810's the British anti-slavery movement had virtually put an end to slavery as a whole.
    
    The Slave Trade
    
    "Broadly speaking, the British slave trade began with private enterprise, survived its emergent years with the aid of state granted monopolies and during the eighteenth-century heyday, gradually reverted to completely free trade. In this process the history of the British slave trade between 1600 and 1800 accurately prefigured the commercial history of the British Empire as a whole over a far longer period" (Craton 55). Joseph Inikori argues that the slave trade's importance in helping develop the credit market in England before the Industrial Revolution should not be ignored (Explorations in Economic History 219).
    
    1640-- English sugar plantations created in the West Indies. Transatlantic slave trading rapidly increased.
    
    1660 and 1663--Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa was chartered. This company challenged the Dutch supremacy in West African trade. Shareholders included the King and Queen.
    
    1672-- The Royal African Company (RAC) given charter due to the previous charter holder's "serious organizational flaws" (Craton 58). This company drew upon shareholders outside of nobility. Two-thirds of the stocks were owned by businessmen. Demand of slaves estimated to be 25,000 a year, but in only one year (1686-87) did they carry at least 10,000. During the height of the RAC's operations the goods used to purchase the West African slaves were 60% textiles, 19% metals, 14% "cowries, beads, and coral," and 7% "chiefly cutlery, firearms, and gunpowder" (Craton 78). During the eighteenth century, liquor, especially rum made from the sugar plantations' molasses, was increasingly used to trade for Africans.
    
    1680-- Pamphlet war erupted between the RAC and those wanting the monopoly broken. Free-trade, chartered companies, protections, and laissez faire were all issues. Both sides agreed that slavery was good for the "general prosperity of England" (Craton 63).
    
    1698-- "Act to Settle the Trade to Africa" comes from Parliament. Any merchant could now trade in slaves provided a 10% duty on all trade goods carried was paid to the RAC. Strangely "quite a few" shareholders of the RAC acted in a private capacity as well with the passage of this Act.
    
    1706-- the Lord Chief Justice ruled "There is no such thing as a slave by the laws of England. (Walvin 34).
    
    1712-- "Ten Per Cent" Act runs out. Any merchant may now enter the slave trade.
    
    1729-- the Attorney- and Solicitor-Generals ruled against the Lord Chief Justice's decision.
    
    1730-- After this year the RAC's sole function was to maintain and administer the West African forts, but with the subsidy withdrawn in 1746, the RAC rapidly slid to extinction.
    
    1750-1788-- Trade operated under principles of nearly free trade and laissez faire. Perversely, this time is usually termed the "golden age" of the slave trade (Tattersfield 357). By mid-eighteenth century "demand had far outstripped supply" (Craton 75) though not for lack of trying on the slavers part. The eighteenth century transported as many slaves as the previous and subsequent centuries combined. Death rates for English captains and crew were at least as high as the Africans' on the Middle Passage--the term describing the voyage across the Atlantic. Of Liverpool's ships, less than half of the crew returned alive in 1787. Controversy surrounds the profitablity of the slave trade. Richardson argues it was 8.1%. Others, such as Darity and Inikori, say it is 17% or even greater than 20%. (Exploration in Economic History 382, 498).
    
    1762-- Lord Chancellor declared "As soon as a man sets foot on English ground he is free" (Walvin 34).
    
    1772-- Slavery abolished by judicial fiat though laws still protected the slave-owners and indeed gave them more power over the years. 20,000 blacks in England. Most living in London.
    
    1783-- English Quakers gave Parliament the first important anti-slavery petition.
    
    1787-1833-- Height of the British Abolitionist movement. Slavery became viewed as an alien (colonial) institution. Hence it did not belong in England.
    
    1807-- Slave trade abolished with British colonies.
    
    1834-- Slavery abolished in Caribbean by Parliament.
    
    Bibliography:
    
    "Slavery." Encyclopedia Britannica. 15 ed. 1991.
    Craton, Michael. Sinews of Empire. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974.
    Darity, William, Jr. "Profitability of the British Trade in Slaves Once Again." Explorations in Economic History (26.3):380-384.
    Inikori, Joseph E. "The Credit Needs of the African Trade and the Development of the Credit Economy in England." Explorations in Economic History (27.2):197-231.
    Richardson, David. "Accounting for Profits in the British Trade in Slaves: Reply to William Darity." Explorations in Economic History (26.4):492-499.
    Walvin, James. England, Slaves, and Freedom, 1776-1838. Hong Kong: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1986.
    
  •  

   

• Mark Ridley reviews Jared Diamond's GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL. (short extract)
  • The uselessness of zebras
    Mark Ridley
    TLS
    Friday November 14 1997
    GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL. The fates of human societies. By Jared Diamond. 480pp. Cape. Pounds 18.99. - 0 224 03809 5.
    
    During the European "age of expansion", from roughly the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, a wave of colonists sailed out, conquered, and culturally controlled large regions of the globe. The means by which they were able to do so are the "Guns, Germs, and Steel", of Jared Diamond's title, but his book is about a deeper question. Why was it the Europeans who had the instruments of power, rather than the Native Americans, Australian aboriginals, or Khoisan (called Hottentots by a politically less correct age) whom they conquered? (continues)
  •  

• The BBC's Story of Africa

  • The Story of Africa -- BBC
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/index.shtml
    
    Subtitled African History from the Dawn of Time, this extensive and
    well-designed Website boasts more than 120,000 words, over 120
    images, and over 40 audio files about Africa. Its fourteen sections
    cover the topics of Africa's early history, the Nile Valley, West
    African kingdoms, the Swahili, traditional religions, Islam,
    Christianity, slavery, Central African kingdoms, Africa and Europe
    (1800 - 1914), Southern Africa, history between the two World Wars,
    and Independence. In addition to text and supplemental images, each
    section offers a timeline, a bibliography of further reading, and a
    list of annotated links. A forum for featuring visitor's comments,
    criticisms, and suggestions will also shortly be launched. This is
    certainly a Website to spend some time on and could serve as a fine
    basis for junior and high school curriculum on the continent. [DC]
    
    From The Scout Report for Social Sciences & Humanities, Copyright
    Internet Scout Project 1994-2001. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/

   

  •  

• OTHER REFERENCES 

  • 
    Black History Resource Working Group, Slavery: An Introduction To The African Holocaust, 1995
    
    Edwards, Paul (ed.), Equiano's Travels, His Autobiography: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, first published 1789, Heinemann, 1967
     
    Equiano, Olaudah [excerpt from: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African (London, 1789). An Ibo from Nigeria remembers his kidnapping http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/3.htm
     
    Everett, Susan, History of Slavery, Bison, 1978
     
    Hair, P. E. H.,  The Atlantic Slave Trade and Black Africa
    
    Harms, Robert W., The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade, 2001, ISBN: 0465028713
     
    Reynolds, Edward, Stand the Storm: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Allison & Busby, 1985
     
    Tibbles, Anthony (ed.), Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity, HMSO, 1994
     
    Walvin, James  The Slave Trade, Sutton, 1999
     
    Walvin, James, An African Life, The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745-1797, Continuum, 1998
     
    Walvin, James, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery, Harper Collins, 1992

   

• LINKS

  • C-18L Resources for 18th-century studies across the disciplines. http://www.personal.psu.edu/special/C18/c18-l.htm
    

  • The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
    http://www.gliah.org and http://www.gilderlehrman.org  
    The Institute, which hosts summer institutes for teachers, awards research fellowships and book prizes to scholars, and sponsors a center for the study of slavery, resistance, and abolition at Yale, has made a remarkable array of instructional materials available online. Created by Steven Mintz and Sara McNeil of the University of Houston, these include a U.S. history textbook; over 400 annotated documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection on deposit at the Pierpont Morgan Library, supplemented by primary sources on slavery, Mexican American and Native American history, and U.S. political, social, and legal history; succinct essays on the history of film, ethnicity, private life, and technology; multimedia  exhibitions; and reference resources that include a searchable database of 1,500 annotated links, classroom handouts, chronologies, glossaries, an audio archive including speeches and book talks by historians, and a visual archive with hundreds of historical maps and images. The site's Ask the HyperHistorian feature allows users to pose questions to professional historians.

  • An A-Z of African Studies on the Internet http://www.lib.msu.edu/limb/a-z/az.html