Atlantic and Africa

Traces the inner connections between the second slavery in the Americas, slavery in Africa, the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, and the "Great Transformation" of the nineteenth century world economy.

The Atlantic and Africa breaks new ground by exploring the connections between two bodies of scholarship that have developed separately from one another. On the one hand, the "second slavery" perspective that has reinterpreted the relation of Atlantic slavery and capitalism by emphasizing the extraordinary expansion of new frontiers of slave commodity production and their role in the economic, social, and political transformations of the nineteenth-century world-economy. On the other hand, Africanist scholarship that has established the importance of slavery and slave trading in Africa to the political, economic and social organization of African societies during the nineteenth century. Taken together, these two movements enable us to delineate the processes forming the capitalist world-economy, establish its specific geographical and historical structure, and reintegrates Africa into the transformations in the world economy. This volume explores this paradigm at diverse levels ranging from state formation and the reorganization of world markets to the creation of new social roles and identities.

Dale W. Tomich is Professor of Sociology and History at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar and editor of Atlantic Transformations: Empire, Politics and Slavery during the Nineteenth Century, both published by SUNY press. Paul E. Lovejoy is Distinguished Research Professor of History at York University, Canada. He is the author of many books, including Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa and Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions.