Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa

by Paul E. Lovejoy

Overview

This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. Paul E. Lovejoy discusses the medieval Islamic slave trade and the Atlantic trade as well as the enslavement process and the marketing of slaves. He considers the impact of European abolition and assesses slavery's role in African history. The book corrects the accepted interpretation that African slavery was mild and resulted in the slaves' assimilation. Instead, slaves were used extensively in production, although the exploitation methods and the relationships to world markets differed from those in the Americas. Nevertheless, slavery in Africa, like slavery in the Americas, developed from its position on the periphery of capitalist Europe. This new edition revises all statistical material on the slave trade demography and incorporates recent research and an updated bibliography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781139124744
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/10/2011
Series:	African Studies , #117
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Paul E. Lovejoy is a Distinguished Research Professor at York University, Toronto and holds the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples and a member of the UNESCO 'Slave Route' Project. Lovejoy's recent publications include Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2010) and Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (2009). He is the editor of the Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora for Africa World Press. He has received several awards, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Stirling in 2007, the President's Research Award of Merit from York University in 2009 and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the University of Texas, Austin in 2010.

Table of Contents

1. Africa and slavery; 2. On the frontiers of Islam, 1400–1600; 3. The export trade in slaves, 1600–1800; 4. The enslavement of Africans, 1600–1800; 5. The organization of slave marketing, 1600–1800; 6. Relationships of dependency, 1600–1800; 7. The nineteenth-century slave trade; 8. Slavery and 'legitimate trade' on the west African coast; 9. Slavery in the savanna during the era of the Jihads; 10. Slavery in central, southern, and eastern Africa in the nineteenth century; 11. The abolitionist impulse; 12. Slavery in the political economy of Africa.

Editorial Reviews

"As with all good history, Transformations in Slavery makes us see the present in the new light it casts on the past. This clear narrative is charged with philosophical sophistication and enlivened by well-placed anecdote."
Tony Voss, African Studies Quarterly

From the Publisher