Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the forced migration of roughly twelve million Africans across the Atlantic reshaped economies, cultures, and social structures on multiple continents, leaving consequences that remain visible today. Anthropologists and historians working on the Transatlantic Slave Trade examine not only the mechanics of colonial commerce and racial hierarchy but also how enslaved people resisted, adapted, and forged coherent identities and communities under extreme duress. A central ongoing question is how African cultural practices survived, transformed, and blended into diasporic forms across the Americas — from religious syncretism to language to kinship networks — and what that continuity reveals about human agency in conditions of brutal constraint. Researchers are also pushing to recover voices and experiences long absent from the archive, asking how legal status, racial categorization, and resistance strategies varied across different colonial regimes and what those differences can tell us about the broader structures of Atlantic modernity.

Works

107,310

Total citations

436,272

Keywords

Transatlantic Slave TradeAtlantic HistorySlaveryAfrican DiasporaSlave ResistanceColonial America