Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1800

Rev. edition of: Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1680. 1992.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. The birth of an Atlantic world -- 2. The development of commerce between Europeans and Africans -- 3. Slavery and African social structure -- 4. The process of enslavement and the slave trade -- 5. Africans in colonial Atlantic societies -- 6. Africans and Afro-Americans in the Atlantic world: life and labor -- 7. African cultural groups in the Atlantic world -- 8. Transformations of African culture in the Atlantic world -- 9. African religions and Christianity in the Atlantic world -- 10. Resistance, runaways, and rebels -- 11. Africans in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. Prior to 1680, Africa's economic and military strength enabled African elites to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics which made slaves so necessary to European colonizers.

This edition contains a new chapter extending the story into the eighteenth century.