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Using an ensemble of sources and current concepts, this book proposes new ways of conceiving the place of the caravan and the dynasty in Maghribian historical experiences and modes of identification.

Written by a major African merchant at the height of Calabar's overseas commerce, Antera Duke's diary provides valuable information on Old Calabar's economic activity both with other African businessmen and with European ship captains who arrived to trade for slaves, produce and provisions. The publication of this volume will mark the first publicly available edition of this valuable primary source in over fifty years.

Background A proportion of 1/4 to 1/2 of North African female pool is made of typical sub-Saharan lineages, in higher frequencies as geographic proximity to sub-Saharan Africa increases. The Sahara was a strong geographical barrier against gene flow, at least since 5,000 years ago, when desertification affected a larger region, but the Arab trans-Saharan slave trade could have facilitate enormously this migration of lineages. Till now, the genetic consequences of these forced trans-Saharan movements of people have not been ascertained. Results The distribution of the main L haplogroups in North Africa clearly reflects the known trans-Saharan slave routes: West is dominated by L1b, L2b, L2c, L2d, L3b and L3d; the Center by L3e and some L3f and L3w; the East by L0a, L3h, L3i, L3x and, in common with the Center, L3f and L3w; while, L2a is almost everywhere. Ages for the haplogroups observed in both sides of the Saharan desert testify the recent origin (holocenic) of these haplogroups in sub-Saharan Africa, claiming a recent introduction in North Africa, further strengthened by the no detection of local expansions. Conclusions The interpolation analyses and complete sequencing of present mtDNA sub-Saharan lineages observed in North Africa support the genetic impact of recent trans-Saharan migrations, namely the slave trade initiated by the Arab conquest of North Africa in the seventh century. Sub-Saharan people did not leave traces in the North African maternal gene pool for the time of its settlement, some 40,000 years ago.

From 1501, when the first slaves arrived in Hispaniola, until the nineteenth century, some twelve million people were abducted from West Africa and shipped across thousands of miles of ocean – the infamous Middle Passage – to work in the colonies of the New World. Perhaps two million Africans died at sea. Why was slavery so widely condoned, during most of this period, by leading lawyers, religious leaders, politicians and philosophers? How was it that the educated classes of the Western world were prepared for so long to accept and promote an institution that would in later ages be condemned as barbaric? Exploring these and other questions – and the slave experience on the sugar, rice, coffee and cotton plantations – Kenneth Morgan discusses the rise of a distinctively Creole culture; slave revolts, including the successful revolution in Haiti (1791-1804); and the rise of abolitionism, when the ideas of Montesquieu, Wilberforce, Quakers and others led to the slave trade’s systemic demise. At a time when the menace of human trafficking is of increasing concern worldwide, this timely book reflects on the deeper motivations of slavery as both ideology and merchant institution.

In late-seventeenth-century Morocco, Mawlay Isma'il commanded his officials to enslave all blacks: that is, to buy coercively or freely those already slaves and to enslave those who were free, including the Haratin (meaning free blacks or freed ex-slaves). This command violated the most salient Islamic legal code regarding the institution of slavery, which states that it is illegal to enslave fellow Muslims. This controversy caused a heated debate and overt hostility between the 'ulama' (Muslim scholars) and Mawlay Isma'il. Official slave registers were created to justify the legality of the enforced buying of slaves from their owners and the enslavement of the Haratin. An equation of blackness and slavery was being developed to justify the subjection of the free Muslim black Moroccans. To prove the slave status of the black Moroccans, the officials in charge of the slavery project established a fictional hierarchy of categories of slaves. This project therefore constructed a slave status for all black people, even those who were free.

Diasporic Africa presents the most recent research on the history and experiences of people of African descent outside of the African continent. By incorporating Europe and North Africa as well as North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this reader shifts the discourse on the African diaspora away from its focus solely on the Americas, underscoring the fact that much of the movement of people of African descent took place in Old World contexts. This broader view allows for a more comprehensive approach to the study of the African diaspora. The volume provides an overview of African diaspora studies and features as a major concern a rigorous interrogation of \"identity.\" Other primary themes include contributions to western civilization, from religion, music, and sports to agricultural production and medicine, as well as the way in which our understanding of the African diaspora fits into larger studies of transnational phenomena.

\"The history of slavery in Morocco,\" and of Morocco as a whole, El Hamel demonstrates, \"cannot be considered separately from the racial terror of the global slave trade\" (p. 4), and to ignore the complicated history of blackness in Morocco represents, itself, a project of whitening. The first chapter's insistence on the necessity of rereading both the Qur'an itself and Islamic jurisprudence in relation to political projects of racialization interrogates basic assumptions about the nature of concubinage, gendered slavery, and moral constructions of sexuality in Islam broadly.

\"Serving the Master: Slavery and Society in Nineteenth-Century Morocco\" by Mohammed Ennaji is reviewed.