Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800

An invaluable scholarly source for understanding the Atlantic slave system at its source.  Among the book’s virtues are details of the cultures and politics in the area of European penetration and African slavery itself and the African participation in the European trade. This book should be recognized with the extensive literature on the Atlantic slave trade for its acknowledgment of the great range of African languages and cultures that ended up in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America.

This is my favorite book on Atlantic history. It had a profound influence on the way I came to understand Black cultural and religious identity formation in the Americas. In this groundbreaking study, Thornton explores Africa’s involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries with a focus on the causes and consequences of the slave trade. It teaches us to look at Africa during the era of the transatlantic slave trade with a new perspective; not as a pure, virgin continent where people only took pride in indigenous traditions, but as a dynamic space marked by… show more.