West-African-Narratives-of-Slavery-Texts-from-Late-Nineteenth-and-Early-Twentieth-Century-Ghana-by-Sandra-E.-Greene

After more than forty years of sustained research, historians have learned a great deal about the trade in human beings that existed in West Africa between c. 1500 to c. 1870, the era of the Atlantic slave trade. We know that more than twelve and half million individuals were sold for export to the Americas and that countless more were enslaved within West Africa itself. We know where and how slaves were acquired and the relative importance that warfare, kidnapping, legal mechanisms, economic processes, and religious institutions played in generating an enslaved population. We know the West African trade routes that were used to transport slaves to regional and local markets. We know as well the forms of resistance employed by the enslaved and the ways West African slave buyers, sellers, and owners attempted to thwart that resistance.