Download Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (African Studies) ePub

In the third preface, the author claimed this book was intended to be an introduction to the history of slavery in Africa and how slavery in Africa was transformed over time. The author fulfills his promise, but I will go on and say that this book is FAR from an introduction. Maybe it's due to his writing style, but this isn't a book I would recommend to someone who's looking for an introduction to African slavery. For me, the biggest problem was that he jumped from area to area, time period to time period, discussing the events occurring through all of these different areas and periods, making it very difficult to follow at times.

However, with all that said, this isn't a bad book by any means as far as the information goes. After all, he condensed centuries of slavery into about 400 pages, and succeeded in doing what he set out to do. If you are interested in this aspect of African history, or if you are an African American (like me), who wants to know more about the mechanism that brought us to the United States, read this book. I'd suggest for one to start with a different book first, but eventually, make sure to read this.

I'd give this a 4.5 if I could.

This book has great information about the subject of slavery the Sudan,Mali,Senegambia area, Sokoto of Northern Nigeria, Biafra etc. This book is with it .

Any text by Lovejoy on the African Diaspora should not be missed! The text gives great insight into the African Diaspora and many subsequent authors cite his works.

Holy cow.

This book is repetitive as all hell, and is apparently written for fourth graders. The text is excruciating to read. The information underneath the nonsense is useful, but parsing it from the dreadful writing is inglorious labor.

This important book is the third edition of Paul Lovejoy's work that combines information and analysis on slavery in Africa. Its scope is vast, covering the whole continent over about five centuries, and on the whole it does what it sets out to well. Like most works of synthesis, it is open to criticism on some details by specialists, but a comprehensive book by a single author is better than a collection of essays that would probably miss out a number of themes or regions. I read the second edition some years ago, and this edition is significantly updated to include new information, although Lovejoy's main arguments haven't changed.

This book aims to describe and explain how African history was influenced by slavery. African slavery is a sensitive topic, and Lovejoy is clear that he regards it as a critical feature in the development of many parts of Africa. He argues that it was very much influenced, first by the North African and Middle-eastern Islamic slave trade, and then (and more significantly) by the Atlantic slave trades. Lovejoy considers the Atlantic slave trade caused radical changes which transformed African society. He accepts that the Muslim slave trade and slavery within Africa were also important, but less radically so, and rejects the view that the Atlantic slave trade had only a limited influence on African history. Lovejoy also discounts comparisons with slavery in the Americas, and considers indigenous African slavery had only a limited impact on the development of the Atlantic trade. He pays particular attention to two other factors, enslavement (which rarely occurred outside Africa) and the spread of slavery in Africa after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.

The scope is tremendous, but broadly Lovejoy describes the volume of the various slave trades over time, detailing the regional origins, ethnicity, gender and age of slaves involved in each trade. Sometimes the sheer volume of the information he presents is intimidating, and unfortunately Lovejoy's writing style can be dry to the point of tediousness. However, no-one else has accepted the challenge in quite the same way as he has, so he should be praised for undertaking it.

The book has some deficiencies; it concentrates on West and West-central Africa, with less on the East coast trade or Ethiopia and very little on southern Africa, and coverage before 1800 is quite limited. Perhaps the biggest shortcoming is the over-use of the concept of "the slave mode of production". Firstly, this concentrates in the economic aspects of slavery and tends to ignore the alternative social concept of slaves as property and the process of enslavement as the reduction of a human to the status of a thing. Concentration on modes of production diverts attention too much away from slaves as people and says little about their lives and cultures. Secondly Lovejoy reduces the huge diversity of African slavery into only two theoretical classes. In one, mainly in Muslim Africa and on the West African coast, slaves formed a distinct group of workers, often in slave gangs on plantations. In the other type, households contained small numbers of slaves who could be assimilated into the wider family, as in Central Africa. In outline this is a useful concept, but Lovejoy uses it as almost his only basis for analysis.

This book is best in terms of the information it provides as Lovejoy summarises an enormous amount of material in a single volume and, if its theoretical analysis focusing on the slave mode of production leads to some distortion, this does not detract from its value as a source of data. Lovejoy provides many informative tables and several useful maps as well as well as a detailed bibliography. Overall, a very good one-volume introduction.

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.