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NOTE: The preparation page for your SECOND EXAMINATION on Monday, 1 November, will be available by 3:30 pm today.

Slavery in Africa and the developing Atlantic networks

Reading: Thornton, chs. 3 & 4.

1. What are the major problems of fact and interpretation that underlie the current scholarly debate over the nature of slavery in Africa and the effects of the Atlantic slave trade on the African regions that participated?
2. Why was slavery widespread in Africa even before the development of the Atlantic slave trade?
3. Why was personal property in land rare in West Africa?
4. Why were the institutions through which people claimed the products of human production different in Africa and Europe?
5. In what ways did an organizational dependency on kinship lead to the elaboration in Africa of politically and economically inegalitarian human collectivities?
6. Why was there a close connection between ancestral and territorial deities in much of Africa?
7. Why was it thought, in both Africa and Europe, that conquerors had the right to enslave the conquered?
8. What assumptions are suggested about government autonomy and capacity when African collectivities are described as "states"?
9. In the West African political context, what made a particular leader "strong"? What made him or her "weak"?
10. Why was kinship the normal means in West Africa to express relations of dependency?
11. Why were slaves employed by Africans for a wider range of purposes than was the case with Western European use of slave labor?
12. Why were European traders so quickly able to gain participation in the ongoing West African slave trade?
13. Why didn't the "western way of war" permit Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to use military intimidation to control the supply of slaves from West and West Central Africa?
14. What factors led to warfare in Western Africa?
15. Why were the Portuguese drawn into wars in Angola between 1579 and 1655?
16. Why were there such enormous variations in the size of African political units in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?
17. Why did some African areas, like Benin and Kongo, at times cease to participate in the Atlantic slave trade?
18. Why did the export of African slaves expand so rapidly after 1650? Why did Allada become the center of this expansion?
19. Why were European soldiers willing to serve as mercenary troops for African rulers?
20. What role did warfare and political instability have on the availability of slaves?

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Revised:  28 July 1999

URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/spemp/reading.17.html