8 Atlantic African, American, and European Backgrounds to Contact, Commerce, and Enslavementtogether, these entries are critically important for several
reasons, not the least of which stems from an intense treat-
ment of the crucial role played by Africans in the political,
social, and economic development of the Atlantic world.
Notably, Africa is regarded in its specifi city in this volume
and thus enables a more enhanced understanding of the
particular roles that specifi c Africans played in the devel-
opment of the region during the era of slavery and the slave
trade. Moreover, these entries highlight several of the key
features constitutive of the modern world including the rise
of burgeoning capitalist production and consumption,
globalization, and industry inasmuch as the raw materials
produced in colonial regions were used to support increas-
ing factory production in Europe.^42 Because Africans on
the continent along with their contemporaries and progeny
held captive in the New World played a persistent role in the
development of the Atlantic world, they must be regarded
as critical agents of change in a burgeoning modern world,
rather than as its mere victims.Jason YoungNotes- John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 8, 9. - Manuel Komroff , Th e Travels of Marco Polo (Garden City,
NY: Garden City Publishing, 1926), 313; Larner, Marco Polo, 80,
144–46, 60–67. - John Esposito, ed., Th e Oxford History of Islam (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 183, 329; Larner, Marco Polo, 12. - Larner, Marco Polo, 13; Benjamin Tudela, Th e Itinerary of
Benjamin of Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages (Malibu, CA: J.
Simon, 1983). - Herodotus, Herodotus, 4 vols., trans. A. D. Godley (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920–25), quoted in V. Y.
Mudimbe, Th e Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994), 18. - Mudimbe, Idea, 17.
- Ibid.
- Peter Russell, Prince Henry “Th e Navigator”: A Life (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 317, 345. - For a fuller treatment of the Romanus Pontifex see Mu-
dimbe, Idea, 31–37. - Esposito, Islam, 169, 180–81, 317–20.
- Russell, Prince Henry, 131, 251.
- Ibid., 90–91.
- Ibid., 97, 131, 251.
- Diogo Gomez, De la Premiere Decouverte de la Guinee (Bis-
sau, Guinea-Bissau: Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa: So-
ciedade Industrial de Tipografi a, 1959), 22; Hugh Th omas, Th e
Slave Trade: Th e Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1 440– 1870 (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 69. - Russell, Prince Henry, 258; Th omas, Slave Trade, 21–24.
to a form of economic necessity.”^37 In the end, the true test
of African voluntary participation lies not in the decisions
of coastal slave traders and royal courts to provide Euro-
peans with slaves, but rather hinges on the experiences of
those who opted out of the trade. Th at is, in order to be
fully voluntary, West African traders and political leaders
must be shown to have been “free” not to participate in the
trade. In fact, one fi nds that the choice to participate in the
trade was not equal. Th e attempts made by King Afonso of
Kongo are instructive here. When members of his family
along with other nobility were captured and sold as slaves
to Portuguese merchants, Afonso wrote to Portuguese
heads of state, railing against the brutality and licentious-
ness of slave traders. He attempted to make the trade ille-
gal in Kongo and expressed his conviction that as far as the
Luso-Kongo trade was concerned, Kongo had need only of
priests, teachers for the schools, and materials necessary for
sacraments.^38 Afonso’s request fell on deaf ears as the slave
trade increased precipitously despite the king’s desire to see
it stopped. Th roughout the 16th and 17th centuries, Kongo
kings wrote to papal authorities and European monarchs in
unsuccessful attempts to address and remedy the harmful
eff ects of an ever-increasing trade.^39
Perhaps Elizabeth Isichei writes it best when she argues
that the trade in slaves “was essentially an exploitive alliance
between a comprador class—rulers, merchants, and mili-
tary aristocracy—which joined with an external exploiter
to prey upon the peasant population.” Indeed, Walter Rod-
ney suggested as much years ago when he argued: “Th e re-
sponsibility for the slave trade, as far as Africans bear the
responsibility, lies squarely upon the shoulders of the tribal
rulers and elites of coastal polities. Th ey were in alliance
with the European slave merchants, and it was upon the
mass of the people that they jointly preyed.”^40
Notably, recent scholarship illustrates the great lengths
to which Africans at all levels of society resisted Atlantic
slaving. So Sylviane Diouf argues that Africans engaged in
various strategies of resistance including resettling to iso-
lated areas, building fortresses, transforming the natural
habitat, forming secret societies, and engaging in armed
resistance among others.^41 By these varied methods, Diouf
contends that millions of people were likely spared the hor-
rors of the slave trade.
Th e entries that follow chronicle, in detail, the histori-
cal developments that resulted in the creation of an African
Atlantic world between the 15th and 18th centuries. Taken