Slave Owners of West Africa
Slave Owners of West Africa

Author: Sandra E. Greene

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2017-05-22

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 0253026024

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In this groundbreaking book, Sandra E. Greene explores the lives of three prominent West African slave owners during the age of abolition. These first-published biographies reveal personal and political accomplishments and concerns, economic interests, religious beliefs, and responses to colonial rule in an attempt to understand why the subjects reacted to the demise of slavery as they did. Greene emphasizes the notion that the decisions made by these individuals were deeply influenced by their personalities, desires to protect their economic and social status, and their insecurities and sympathies for wives, friends, and other associates. Knowing why these individuals and so many others in West Africa made the decisions they did, Greene contends, is critical to understanding how and why the institution of indigenous slavery continues to influence social relations in West Africa to this day.

Lose Your Mother
Lose Your Mother

Author: Saidiya Hartman

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2008-01-22

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780374531157

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An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery from the 16th century to the present.--Elizabeth Schmidt, "The New York Times."

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800
Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800

Author: John Thornton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-04-28

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 113964338X

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This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. African institutions, political events, and economic structures shaped Africa's voluntary involvement in the Atlantic arena before 1680. Africa's economic and military strength gave African elites the capacity to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics of colonization which made slaves so necessary to European colonizers, and he explains why African slaves were placed in roles of central significance. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors, transferring and transforming African culture in the New World.

In the Shadow of Slavery
In the Shadow of Slavery

Author: Judith Carney

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-02-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0520949536

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The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. In the Shadow of Slavery provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods—millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the "Asian" long bean, for example—are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting, original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plots—"botanical gardens of the dispossessed"—became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.