Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa: 117 (African Studies, Series Number 117) Paperback – Illustrated, 26 Jan. 2012

This book is a must-read if you want to really understand African slavery, including the Atlantic slave trade and how black Africans reacted to it.Although this is an academic work, it is very well written and perfectly accessible to a non-specialist with an interest in African history. It discusses how Africans became enslaved, the slave trade, and how slaves were used. The reference to "transformations" is making the point that these processes varied in different parts of Africa and different times. The stated purpose of the book is to summarise the academic literature on the subject. The first chapter outlines the author's view, and the subsequent chapters go into more detail on different periods and aspects of slavery.The author ends with the grim observation that slavery, although officially illegal in all countries since 1962, still exists in practice, and calls for it to be stamped out.

This important book is the third edition of Paul Lovejoy's work combining information and analysis on slavery in Africa. Its scope is vast, covering the whole continent over about five centuries, and on the whole it does what it sets out to well. Like most works of synthesis, it is open to criticism on some details by specialists, but a comprehensive book by a single author is better than a collection of essays that would probably miss out a number of themes or regions. I read the second edition some years ago, and this edition is significantly updated to include new information, although Lovejoy's main arguments haven't changed.This book aims to describe and explain how African history was influenced by slavery. African slavery is a sensitive topic, and Lovejoy is clear that he regards it as a critical feature in the development of many parts of Africa. He argues that it was very much influenced by the North African and Middle-eastern Islamic, then the Atlantic, slave trades. Lovejoy considers the Atlantic slave trade caused radical changes which transformed African society. He accepts that the Muslim slave trade and slavery within Africa were also important and rejects the view that the Atlantic slave trade had only a limited influence on African history. Lovejoy also discounts comparisons with slavery in the Americas, and considers indigenous African slavery had only a limited impact on the development of the Atlantic trade. He pays particular attention to two other factors, enslavement (which rarely occurred outside Africa) and the spread of slavery in Africa after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.The scope is tremendous, but broadly Lovejoy describes the volume of the various slave trades over time, detailing the regional origins, ethnicity, gender and age of slaves involved in each trade. Sometimes the sheer volume of the information he presents is intimidating, and unfortunately Lovejoy's writing style can be dry to the point of tediousness. However, no-one else has accepted the challenge in quite the same way as he has, so he should be praised for undertaking it.The book has some deficiencies; it concentrates on West and West-central Africa, with less on the East coast trade or Ethiopia and very little on southern Africa, and coverage before 1800 is quite limited. Perhaps the biggest shortcoming is the over-use of the concept of "the slave mode of production". Firstly, this concentrates in the economic aspects of slavery and tends to ignore the alternative social concept of slaves as property and the process of enslavement as the reduction of a human to the status of a thing. Concentration on modes of production diverts attention too much away from slaves as people and says little about their lives and cultures. Secondly Lovejoy reduces the huge diversity of African slavery into only two theoretical classes. In one, mainly in Muslim Africa and the West African coast, slaves formed a distinct group of workers, often in slave gangs on plantations. In the other type, households contained small numbers of slaves who could be assimilated into the wider family, as in Central Africa. In outline this is a useful concept, but Lovejoy uses it as almost his only basis for analysis.This book is best in terms of the information it provides as Lovejoy summarises an enormous amount of material in a single volume and, if its theoretical analysis focusing on the slave mode of production leads to some distortion, this does not detract from its value as a source of data. Lovejoy provides many informative tables and several useful maps as well as well as a detailed bibliography. Overall, a very good one-volume introduction.