First Published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection of sixteen short papers, together with a complex and very much longer introductory essay by the editors on "African 'Slavery' as an Institution of Marginality," constitutes an impressive attempt by anthropologists and historians to explore, describe, and analyze some of the various kinds of human bondage within a number of precolonial African societies. It is important to note that in spite of the precolonial emphasis of the volume, all of the essays are based at least partly on anthropological or ethnohistorical field research carried out since 1959. All but one have been augmented greatly by more conventional historical research in published as well as archival sources. And although the volume's focus is upon the structures and conditions of servitude within the several African societies described, many of the essays illustrate, and some discuss, the conceptual as well as the practical difficulties of separating the institutions and customs of "domestic" African slavery from those of the European dominated commercial slave trade in which many of the societies participated. -- from JSTOR http://www.jstor.org (May 24, 2013).

Enslaved peoples were brought to the Americas from many places in Africa, but a large majority came from relatively few ethnic groups. Drawing on a wide range of materials in four languages as well as on her lifetime study of slave groups in the New World, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall explores the persistence of African ethnic identities among the enslaved over four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade. Hall traces the linguistic, economic, and cultural ties shared by large numbers of enslaved Africans, showing that despite the fragmentation of the diaspora many ethnic groups retained enough cohesion to communicate and to transmit elements of their shared culture. Hall concludes that recognition of the survival and persistence of African ethnic identities can fundamentally reshape how people think about the emergence of identities among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, about the ways shared identity gave rise to resistance movements, and about the elements of common African ethnic traditions that influenced regional creole cultures throughout the Americas.

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.

This book summarizes a wide range of recent literature on slavery for all of tropical Africa.

Basil Davidson states that by examining three important areas of Africa in the history of slavery 'against a general background of their time and circumstance' he was taking 'a fresh look at the oversea slave trade, the steady year-by-year export of African labour to the West Indies and the Americas that marked the greatest and most fateful migration - forced migration - in the history of man.' North America: Times/Random House

This book provides a fresh interpretation of the development of the English Atlantic slave system.