The British debate over the abolition of the slave trade related not only to the sufferings of those who were enslaved and transported from Africa, but also to its implications for those who remained behind on the African continent. Abolitionists regularly argued that the slave trade had distorted and stunted the development of African societies: William Wilberforce in 1789, for example, represented the abolition of the slave trade as a form of 'reparation to Africa', for the harm which it had allegedly caused there. Likewise, the recent campaign for the payment of 'reparations' for the slave trade has commonly involved a demand for compensation to be paid to Africa, as well as (or rather than) to the descendants of the transported slaves, and has often presented the slave trade as one of the major historical causes of the poverty and underdevelopment of modern Africa. The lecture considers this issue in the light of the most recent scholarship on the history of Africa, with particular emphasis on the demographic and economic consequences of the slave trade.
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Für höhere Schule und Studium
Maße
Höhe: 23.5 cm
Breite: 16.2 cm
ISBN-13
978-3-8258-1115-0 (9783825811150)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
The author:
Prof. Robin Law holds a personal chair at the Department of History of the University of Stirling. His principal research interests are in the pre-colonial history of West Africa and the Atlantic slave trade. He is the author of The Oyo Empire,c.1600-1836 (1977), The Horse in West African History (1980), The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550 - 1750 (1991), The Kingdom of Allada (1997), Ouidah: the social history of a West African slaving "port" 1727 - 1892 (2004), and (with Paul Lovejoy) The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua (2001), a contributor to the Cambridge History of Africa and the Oxford History of the British Empire, and a former editor of the Journal of African History. His main current research project is the publication of correspondence of the Royal African Company of England relating to its activities in West Africa in the late seventeenth century. He is also engaged in an international collaborative research project on The Slave Trade of the Nigerian Hinterland 1650 - 1900, which he co-cordinates with Professor Paul Lovejoy (York University, Canada) and Dr Elisee Soumonni (National University of Benin, West Africa), and is Chair of the Fontes Historiae Africanae (Sources of African History) project of the British Academy.
