Product Description

This book establishes Central Africa as the origin of most Africans brought to English and Dutch American colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and South America in their formative period before 1660. It reveals that Central Africans were frequently possessors of an Atlantic Creole culture that included adaptation of Christianity and elements of European language, especially names and material culture. It places the movement of slaves and creation of the colonies within an Atlantic historical framework, including showing interactions among Africa, Europe, and all of the Americas. It explores the development of attitudes toward race, slavery, and freedom as they developed in the colonies of England and the Netherlands, and it revises earlier discussions on these issues. The book suggests ways in which this generation of Africans helped lay the foundations for subsequent development of African-American culture in all the colonies of these countries.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #740838 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
"A good addition to the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade." -Choice

"Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 is a compelling and well-researched account of the earliest days of Atlantic slavery that will reward students and academics, especially those who reject the notion that we cannot untangle the ultimate origins and cultural antecedents of the first African slaves." -John Roby, African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

"This extremely important and informative book should put to rest any conceivable effort to minimize the brutally destructive impact of the Atlantic slave trade upon Africa and Africans or to blame the victims." -Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

About the Author
Linda M. Heywood is Professor of African American Studies and History at Boston University. She is also W.E.B. DuBois Fellow at Harvard University and formerly a Whiting Fellow at Columbia University as well as Profssor of History at Howard University and Cleveland State University. She is the author of Contested Power in Angola (1999) and editor of Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (2001). Professor Heywood has published in the Journal of African History, Journal of Modern African Studies, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Slavery and Abolition.

John K. Thornton is Professor of African American Studies and History at Boston University. He is also W.E.B. DuBois Fellow at Harvard University and formerly Carter Woodson Fellow at the University of Virginia, as well as Professor of History at Millersville University and Allegheny College. He is a former Lecturer at the University of Zambia. He is author of The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641-1718 (1983), African and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (2nd edition, 1998), The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706 (1998), and Warfare in Atlantic Africa (1999). He has published in, among other journals, The Journal of African History, History in Africa, Cahiers d’etudes africaines, William and Mary Quarterly, American Historical Review, The Americas, and the International Journal of African Historical Studies.

Customer Reviews

very informative
Essentially, this book establishes that the first wave of Africans to get to colonial North America and the Caribbeans were taken mostly from West Central Africa (what would today be Angola). What I found most useful about it was the insight provided in Chapters 2,3 and 4 about the history and the nature of society in pre-colonial West Central Africa. I've always believed that Africa could have achieved integration with the Europe and the rest of the world, on its own terms and at its own pace, without the need for colonial intervention, and the early interactions between the kingdom of Kongo and Portugal (as described in this book) amongst other details illustrate this point well. I also found Chaper 6 very interesting in the way that it showed that early Africans in America were not regarded as "slaves" in the way we understand the term today, but that the status of the African was denigrated over time due to both racist and economic factors.