Slavery and the African Diaspora Beyond the Atlantic

Historians have been chipping away at the edges of Atlantic history for some time now.1 This has produced a vision of the transatlantic slave trade that is no longer just deeply rooted in the Americas while merely brushing the surface of Africa. Rather, historians are addressing ever more seriously the specifically African dynamics of the ocean’s traffic in human misery, while also acknowledging the mobility and longevity of African culture.2 Indigenous slavery, too, both pre-Columbian and colonial, has emerged as a much more widespread and long-lasting phenomenon than previously thought. This had its own transatlantic dimension that itself must be understood within the context of the intra-American slave trade.3 In addition, Jeffrey Fynn-Paul and his collaborators have argued that we should not overlook the enduring importance of the Mediterranean, since the transatlantic slave trade was, they argue, the result of West Africa becoming the Christian Mediterranean’s primary ‘slaving zone’ (i.e. an area at the edge of a polity that enforced an internal no-slaving zone while exploiting hinterlands). This paralleled other slaving zones in Africa and across Eurasia that bordered Islamic polities.4

Ancient history · Archaeology · Atlantic slave trade · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Diaspora · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Polity · Temporalities · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law