The slave trade and the development of the Atlantic Africa port system, 1400s–1800s

Abstract

Scholarly work on the transatlantic slave trade has tended to focus on the volume, conditions and the profits of this hideous commerce and its demographic, economic and social impact on the coastal areas of Atlantic Africa. Much has therefore been published about the history of specific ports and coastal regions, but still little is known about the contribution of the slave trade to the overall formation and shaping of the Atlantic Africa port system and its regional port subsystems , the links between various ports, their commercial struggles, and the variable factors that conditioned changes in their role within the system. This study will partly address these issues by examining how the slave trade, in conjunction with other local, regional and international economic and political dynamics, contributed to the rise and fall of ports in Atlantic Africa and helped shape its port system. In doing so, the analysis is based on shipping information gathered from the TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database, and on the specific literature on various slave ports in Atlantic Africa.

Genomic and geographical structure of human cytomegalovirus

“…Early Infection, most likely acquired from maternal or sibling transmission ( 68 ), may explain why subjects of African origin living in Europe test positive for strains that cluster with known African strains. This would date the split of African and European CMV strains to at least 500 y ago, the time at which the first African slaves were transported to Europe ( 69 ). Although the actual separation is likely to be much older given even the highest estimates of CMV’s mutation rate ( 70 ), or borrowing from rates presumably more accurately estimated for a similar virus, HSV1, for which there are ancient genomes available ( 71 ).…”

Governing Africa’s Blue Economy: The Protection and Utilisation of the Continent’s Blue Spaces

“…The conflicting demands of riparian states to the Nile only intensified when Ethiopia began to build the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in 2011. 17 In West Africa the elaborate network of lakes, streams, and marshes of the Niger River have for centuries fulfilled the food and trade needs of the powerful empires of Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Kamen-Borno and the kingdoms of Yoruba and Benin 18 . Products, such as gold, silk, velvet, iron, ivory, slaves and animal skin filled the boats that crossed the Niger long before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.…”

“…21 The Niger basin is shared 16 Oishimaya Sen Nag, Hellenistic Ancient Egypt (Argean and Ptolemaic Kingdoms), World Atlas, 2017 <https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/hellenistic-ancient-egypt-argean-andptolemaic-kingdoms.html> accessed on 10 August 2019. 17 by more than 200 million people, but the transboundary management of this river basin remains an challenge after twenty years of negotiations. 22 The Afro-Arabic Swahili Empire in East Africa occupied an area of more than 3000 km, from Mogadishu in the north to Mozambique in the south.…”