Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Scholars working at the intersection of colonialism, slavery, and Atlantic trade examine how the forced movement of millions of Africans across the ocean between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries shaped economies, legal systems, and social hierarchies on both sides of the Atlantic. Anthropologists in this area pay particular attention to the experiences of enslaved people themselves — how they resisted bondage, maintained cultural ties, and negotiated identity under conditions designed to strip those things away. A central question driving current research is how African diasporic communities forged coherent social worlds despite deliberate fragmentation, and how the racial categories constructed to justify slavery continued to structure life long after formal abolition. Ongoing debates concern the relative weight of African cultural continuities versus New World adaptations, and how archives built by enslavers can be read against the grain to recover perspectives they were meant to erase.

Works

109,222

Total citations

442,433

Keywords

Transatlantic Slave TradeAtlantic HistorySlaveryAfrican DiasporaSlave ResistanceColonial America