A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana

A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana
Author: Akosua Adoma Perbi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2004
Genre: Affirmative action programs
ISBN:

Slavery has existed in nearly every society in the world at one time or another: the Romans practiced it and so did the Greeks. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana examines slavery as it existed in Ghana until the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade began. Academic research and publication on indigenous slavery in Ghana and in Africa more widely have not received attention commensurate with the importance of the phenomenon: the history of indigenous slavery, which existed long before the trans-Atlantic slave trade, has been a marginal topic in documented historical, studies on Ghana. Yet its weighty historical, and contemporary relevance inside and outside Africa is undisputed. This book begins to redress this neglect. Drawing on sources including oral data from so-called slave descendants, cultural sites and trade routes, court records and colonial government reports, it presents historical and cultural analysis which aims to enhance historical knowledge and understanding of indigenous slavery. The author further intends to provide a holistic view of the indigenous institution of slavery as a formative factor in the social, political and economic development of precolonial Ghana.

A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana

A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana
Author: Akosua Adoma Perbi
Publisher: Sub-Saharan Pub & Traders
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789988550325

Academic research and publication on indigenous slavery in Ghana and in Africa more widely have not received attention commensurate with the importance of the phenomenon: the history of indigenous slavery, which existed long before the trans-Atlantic slave trade, has been a marginal topic in documented historical studies on Ghana. Yet its weighty historical, and contemporary relevance inside and outside Africa is undisputed. This book begins to redress this neglect. Drawing on sources including oral data from so-called slave descendants, cultural sites and trade routes, court records and colonial government reports, it presents historical and cultural analysis which aims to enhance historical knowledge and understanding of indigenous slavery. The author further intends to provide a holistic view of the indigenous institution of slavery as a formative factor in the social, political and economic development of pre- colonial Ghana.

Transformations in Slavery

Transformations in Slavery
Author: Paul E. Lovejoy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2011-10-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139502778

This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. Paul E. Lovejoy discusses the medieval Islamic slave trade and the Atlantic trade as well as the enslavement process and the marketing of slaves. He considers the impact of European abolition and assesses slavery's role in African history. The book corrects the accepted interpretation that African slavery was mild and resulted in the slaves' assimilation. Instead, slaves were used extensively in production, although the exploitation methods and the relationships to world markets differed from those in the Americas. Nevertheless, slavery in Africa, like slavery in the Americas, developed from its position on the periphery of capitalist Europe. This new edition revises all statistical material on the slave trade demography and incorporates recent research and an updated bibliography.

The Other Slavery

The Other Slavery
Author: Andrés Reséndez
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2016-04-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0544602676

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST | WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE. A landmark history—the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early twentieth century. Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of Natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery—more than epidemics—that decimated Indian populations across North America. Through riveting new evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, and Indian captives, The Other Slavery reveals nothing less than a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see. “The Other Slavery is nothing short of an epic recalibration of American history, one that’s long overdue...In addition to his skills as a historian and an investigator, Résendez is a skilled storyteller with a truly remarkable subject. This is historical nonfiction at its most important and most necessary.” — Literary Hub, 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade ““One of the most profound contributions to North American history.”—Los Angeles Times

Slavery in Indian Country

Slavery in Indian Country
Author: Christina Snyder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2010-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674048904

Slavery existed in North America long before the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619. For centuries, from the pre-Columbian era through the 1840s, Native Americans took prisoners of war and killed, adopted, or enslaved them. Christina Snyder's pathbreaking book takes a familiar setting for bondage, the American South, and places Native Americans at the center of her engrossing story. Indian warriors captured a wide range of enemies, including Africans, Europeans, and other Indians. Yet until the late eighteenth century, age and gender more than race affected the fate of captives. As economic and political crises mounted, however, Indians began to racialize slavery and target African Americans. Native people struggling to secure a separate space for themselves in America developed a shared language of race with white settlers. Although the Indians' captivity practices remained fluid long after their neighbors hardened racial lines, the Second Seminole War ultimately tore apart the inclusive communities that Native people had created through centuries of captivity. Snyder's rich and sweeping history of Indian slavery connects figures like Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe with little-known captives like Antonia Bonnelli, a white teenager from Spanish Florida, and David George, a black runaway from Virginia. Placing the experiences of these individuals within a complex system of captivity and Indians' relations with other peoples, Snyder demonstrates the profound role of Native American history in the American past.

Slavery and Its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora

Slavery and Its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora
Author: Rebecca Shumway
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2018-12-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501352172

Ghana-for all its notable strides toward more egalitarian political and social systems in the past 60 years-remains a nation plagued with inequalities stemming from its long history of slavery and slave trading. The work assembled in this collection explores the history of slavery in Ghana and its legacy for both Ghana and the descendants of people sold as slaves from the “Gold Coast” in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. The volume is structured to reflect four overlapping areas of investigation: the changing nature of slavery in Ghana, including the ways in which enslaved people have been integrated into or excluded from kinship systems, social institutions, politics, and the workforce over time; the long-standing connections forged between Ghana and the Americas and Europe through the transatlantic trading system and the forced migration of enslaved people; the development of indigenous and transnational anti-slavery ideologies; and the legacy of slavery and its ongoing reverberations in Ghanaian and diasporic society. Bringing together key scholars from Ghana, Europe and the USA who introduce new sources, frames and methodologies including heritage, gender, critical race, and culture studies, and drawing on archival documents and oral histories, Slavery and Its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora will be of great interest to scholars and students of comparative slavery, abolition and West African history.

Where the Negroes Are Masters

Where the Negroes Are Masters
Author: Randy J. Sparks
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2014-01-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674726472

Annamaboe--largest slave trading port on the Gold Coast--was home to wily African merchants whose partnerships with Europeans made the town an integral part of Atlantic webs of exchange. Randy Sparks recreates the outpost's feverish bustle and brutality, tracing the entrepreneurs, black and white, who thrived on a lucrative traffic in human beings.

Slave Owners of West Africa

Slave Owners of West Africa
Author: Sandra E. Greene
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2017-05-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253026024

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.

Black Rice

Black Rice
Author: Judith A. Carney
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674029216

Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas. Rice accompanied African slaves across the Middle Passage throughout the New World to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable economies in the world. Black Rice tells the story of the true provenance of rice in the Americas. It establishes, through agricultural and historical evidence, the vital significance of rice in West African society for a millennium before Europeans arrived and the slave trade began. The standard belief that Europeans introduced rice to West Africa and then brought the knowledge of its cultivation to the Americas is a fundamental fallacy, one which succeeds in effacing the origins of the crop and the role of Africans and African-American slaves in transferring the seed, the cultivation skills, and the cultural practices necessary for establishing it in the New World. In this vivid interpretation of rice and slaves in the Atlantic world, Judith Carney reveals how racism has shaped our historical memory and neglected this critical African contribution to the making of the Americas.