Toby Green, “The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589” (Cambridge UP, 2011)

New Books in African American Studies · Jul 30, 2014 · 43m

Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the Byzantine Empire and Muslim lands, yet it all but disappeared in Medieval Western and Central Europe. Then, rather suddenly, slavery reappeared in the West, or rather in Western empires. By the early sixteenth century, Portuguese traders had laid the foundations of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They bought or captured slaves in West Africa and then transported and sold those slaves to plantation…