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6 - The slave trade and the African diaspora

from Part Two - Trade, Exchange, and Production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

By
John Thornton
Edited by
Jerry H. Bentley ,
Sanjay Subrahmanyam  and
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Jerry H. Bentley
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Manoa
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
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Summary

The diaspora of African people to the Americas as a result of the trans-atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, in terms of both the length of time and the numbers of people involved. New insight into the ways African culture moved from Africa to the Americas comes from Ira Berlin's research on the role of 'Atlantic Creoles' in the formation of African American culture. When major wars were ongoing, most would have been military captives, in periods of political instability or loss of order, banditry might be more important and in periods of peace and stability perhaps judicial enslavement would lead the group. Transatlantic voyages, in fact all long seaborne voyages, were difficult and dangerous, even for free people going from Europe to America, but there was really no maritime experience quite like the Middle Passage.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History , pp. 135 - 159
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Further Reading

Barry, Boubacar, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Bennett, Herman, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexicans (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
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Brown, Ras Michael, African Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (Cambridge University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Vincent, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burnard, Trevor, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).Google Scholar
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Sweet, James, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Thornton, John, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Thornton, John Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thornton, John Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Jason, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana University Press, 2011).Google Scholar

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