Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade

This is an ambitious collective volume based on papers presented at a conference in 2000 at York University on the interactions between Africa and the Americas. Such connections have been themes in the historiography of the Atlantic world in varying degrees for the last several decades, particularly related to the African diaspora. The authors identify three stages of scholarly interest. On the oldest view, Europeans were mainly responsible for the creation of the Atlantic world. During the second stage, scholars identified and highlighted the role of Africans and their descendants as active participants in and contributors to the emerging Atlantic world. In the latest stage, scholars have begun to examine and demonstrate the “interactive linkages” across the Atlantic in which Africans and Europeans in Brazil (the editors emphasize Brazilians but the model can encompass many others) spent time in the Americas, were changed by their experiences, and returned or moved...