The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589

by Green, Toby

• ISBN13: 9781107014367
• ISBN10: 1107014360
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-10-31
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

The region between the river Senegal and Sierra Leone saw the first trans-Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century. Drawing on many new sources, Toby Green challenges current quantitative approaches to the history of the slave trade. New data on slave origins can show how and why Western African societies responded to Atlantic pressures. Green argues that answering these questions requires a cultural framework and uses the idea of creolization the formation of mixed cultural communities in the era of plantation societies to argue that preceding social patterns in both Africa and Europe were crucial. Major impacts of the sixteenth-century slave trade included political fragmentation, changes in identity and the re-organization of ritual and social patterns. The book shows which peoples were enslaved, why they were vulnerable and the consequences in Africa and beyond.

Table of Contents

The Development of an Atlantic Creole Culture in Western Africa, c.1300-1500

Culture, trade, and diaspora in pre-Atlantic West Africa

The formation of early Atlantic societies in Senegambia and Upper Guinea

The settlement of Cabo Verde and early signs of Creolization in Western Africa

The new Christian diaspora in Cabo Verde and the rise of a Creole culture in Western Africa

The new Christian/Kassanké alliance and the consolidation of Creolization

Creolization and Slavery: Western Africa and the Pan-Atlantic, c. 1492-1589

The early trans-Atlantic slave trade from Western Africa

Trading ideas and trading people: the boom in the contraband trade from Western Africa, c. 1550-1580

Cycles of war and trade in the African Atlantic, c. 1550-1580

Creole societies and the pan-Atlantic in late sixteenth-century Western Africa and America

Conclusion

Lineages, societies, and the slave trade in Western Africa to 1589

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