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A series of transformations, reforms, and attempted abolitions of slavery form a core narrative of nineteenth-century coastal West Africa. As the region’s role in Atlantic commercial networks underwent a gradual transition from principally that of slave exporter to producer of “legitimate goods” and dependent markets, institutions of slavery became battlegrounds in which European abolitionism, pragmatic colonialism, and indigenous agency clashed. In Slavery and Reform in West Africa, Trevor Getz demonstrates that it was largely on the anvil of this issue that French and British policy in West Africa was forged. With distant metropoles unable to intervene in daily affairs, local European administrators, striving to balance abolitionist pressures against the resistance of politically and economically powerful local slave owners, sought ways to satisfy the latter while placating or duping the former. The result was an alliance between colonial officials, company agents, and slave-owning elites that effectively slowed, sidetracked, or undermined serious attempts to reform slave holding. Although slavery was outlawed in both regions, in only a few isolated instances did large-scale emancipations occur. Under the surface, however, slaves used the threat of self-liberation to reach accommodations that transformed the master-slave relationship. By comparing the strategies of colonial administrators, slave-owners, and slaves across these two regions and throughout the nineteenth century, Slavery and Reform in West Africa reveals not only the causes of the astounding success of slave owners, but also the factors that could, and in some cases did, lead to slave liberations. These findings have serious implications for the wider study of slavery and emancipation and for the history of Africa generally.
A history of slavery during the 19th and 20th centuries in three former French colonies.
Annotation Explores in a systematic manner the strategies Africans used to protect and defend themselves and their communities from the onslaught of the Atlantic slave trade and how they assaulted it.
A fascinating collection that advances a renewed conceptual framework for understanding slavery in West Africa today: instead of retracing the end of West African slavery, this work highlights the preliminary contours of its recent reconfigurations.
Commercial Transitions and Abolition in West Africa 1630–1860 by Angus Dalrymple-Smith offers a new interpretation of the move from slave exports to ‘legitimate commerce’ in the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra.
This edited collection, written by eleven leading specialists, examines the nineteenth-century commercial transition in West Africa: the ending of the Atlantic slave trade and the development of alternative forms of 'legitimate' trade, mainly in vegetable products. Approaching the subject from an African, rather than a European or American, perspective, the case studies consider the effects of transition on the African societies involved. They offer significant insights into the history of pre-colonial Africa and the slave trade, the origins of European imperialism, and longer-term issues of economic development in Africa.
Slavery in Africa existed for hundreds of years before it was abolished in the late 19th century. Yet, we know little about how enslaved individuals, especially those who never left Africa, talked about their experiences. Collecting never before published or translated narratives of Africans from southeastern Ghana, Sandra E. Greene explores how these writings reveal the thoughts, emotions, and memories of those who experienced slavery and the slave trade. Greene considers how local norms and the circumstances behind the recording of the narratives influenced their content and impact. This unprecedented study affords unique insights into how ordinary West Africans understood and talked about their lives during a time of change and upheaval.
In this groundbreaking book, Sandra E. Greene explores the lives of three prominent West African slave owners during the age of abolition. These first-published biographies reveal personal and political accomplishments and concerns, economic interests, religious beliefs, and responses to colonial rule in an attempt to understand why the subjects reacted to the demise of slavery as they did. Greene emphasizes the notion that the decisions made by these individuals were deeply influenced by their personalities, desires to protect their economic and social status, and their insecurities and sympathies for wives, friends, and other associates. Knowing why these individuals and so many others in West Africa made the decisions they did, Greene contends, is critical to understanding how and why the institution of indigenous slavery continues to influence social relations in West Africa to this day.
This book brings together a series of new case studies, some by young scholars, others by widely published authors. All are based on original research and designed to enhance our understanding of the process of the abolition of slavery in Africa at the grass-roots level. Part of the studies are on new areas of interest such as the German colonies and the Algerian Sahara. Others throw new light on questions already debated, such as emancipation of the Gold Coast. Some focus on the impact of abolition on particular groups of slaves, such as the royal slaves in Nigeria and concubines in Morocco. Among the themes considered is the role of slaves in their own emancipation, the short and long-term results of abolition, the role of the League of Nations, and the vestiges of slavery in Africa today.
West African societies were transformed by the slave trade, even in regions where few slaves were exported. While many books have been written on the import and export trade and on warrior predation, Dr Searing's concern is with the effects of the Atlantic slave trade on the societies of the Senegal river valley in the eighteenth century. He shows that the growth of the Atlantic trade stimulated the development of slavery within West Africa. Slaves worked as seamen in the river and coasting trades, produced surplus grain to feed slaves in transit, and sometimes came to hold pivotal positions in the political structure of the coastal kingdoms of Senegambia. This local slave system had far-reaching consequences, leading to religious protest and slave rebellions. The changes in agricultural production fostered an ecological crisis.