Publisher's Synopsis
European Invention of African Slavery is the first ever study of the origins of the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa. The investigation is executed through a critical textual analysis of the published literature since the eighteenth century. It posits slavery and the trade in human cargo as European cultural transmissions to West Africa, much like European religion, educational traditions, languages, modes of dressing, and mannerisms brought to Africa by European imperialists. Arguing that the commoditization of man by man is what constitutes slavery and the slave trade, the book traces that cultural practice to the ancient Greeks who passed it down to the Romans and Europeans and demonstrates that African systems of social organization were inimical to the reduction of human beings to the status of commodity. Much of what European and Euro-American scholars have written about the Atlantic slave trade is depicted as fiction, concocted to cover up the evil perpetrated on Africans by European dealers in human cargo. A work of monumental depth and reach, it presents nearly all the arguments advanced for and against the African origin of the Atlantic slave trade. It is an exceptional text for teaching and referencing.
