Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa

Anyone interested in Slavery in Africa must pick this book up. The author, not interested with the fate of the slaves but rahter focusing on the actual process and transformations of slavery in Africa lends his qonderful analysis to the Altantic slave trade and the Islamic slave trade. Here he gives the reader all the important facts. FOr instance he documents how more then 2.3 million slaves were shipped by Arab slavers to North Africa and beyond from 1600-1800, at the same time as 7 million were shipped across the atlantic. Drawing on a wide range of sources this book tells the tale of slavery down to the minute detail. From who were the buyers to where the cources of slaves were, to the brutal methods used to kidnap the slaves themselves. A social and economic analysis as well as a cultural understanding is given to the slave trade. Most important this book casts light on the huge numbers of slaves sent across the Sahara to the slave markets of the Islamic empire. The only small drawbacks are a few minor generalizations made in the introduction but otherwise this is a masterful account. Seth J. Frantzman

Paul Lovejoy, in his study of the Transformation in Slavery within Africa from 1450 to 1900, poses that slavery in Africa changed due to external influences such as the Islamic trans-Saharan trade and the Trans-Atlantic Trade, and due to the dynamics of internal forces such as a social structure based on ethnicity and kinship. The transformation that took place was the emergence of "a system of slavery that was basic to the political economy of many parts of the continent," a system that expanded through the end of the 19th Century, structured on the "interaction between enslavement, the slave trade, and the domestic use of slaves within Africa." The transformation occurs in three stages: from 1450 to 1600, the Islamic trade; from 1600 to 1800, the Trans-Atlantic trade, and the 19th Century, the internalization as a result of the breakdown of exterior slave trade.