• DOI:10.2307/1874022
• Corpus ID: 155847068

Contours of Slavery and Social Change in Africa

@article{Manning1983ContoursOS,
  title={Contours of Slavery and Social Change in Africa},
  author={Patrick R. Manning},
  journal={The American Historical Review},
  year={1983},
  volume={88},
  pages={835}
}

• P. Manning
• Published 1 October 1983
• History
• The American Historical Review

THE PAST GENERATION OF AFRICANIST SCHOLARSHIP, with its profound revision in the interpretation of African social change, has raised questions about previous notions that change in precolonial Africa stemmed primarily from the influence of Europeans and other outsiders. According to the old view-the vision of "eternal Africa"-societies in tropical Africa changed at no more than a glacial pace, except under the relentlessly growing pressure of European intrusion. That this vision of eternal Africa survived until relatively recent times, if only among scholars whose work centered on other regions, is illustrated by H. R. Trevor-Roper's famous characterization of African history as the study of "the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe." A remarkable corpus of recent research has demonstrated, in contrast, the dynamic and innovative characteristics of precolonial African societies, particularly in the political, economic, and religious arenas. ' As a result of this new literature, the Atlantic slave trade-that major avenue of contact between Africans and Europeans from the mid-fifteenth through the late nineteenth centuries-must now be viewed in a substantially different context. The present study focuses on the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on precolonial African societies. In more general terms, it reconsiders the slave trade in terms of the relative importance of domestic and external sources of African social change. In addition to summarizing research on slavery and the slave trade, I hope to show, on the one hand, how the canons of African historiography have conditioned interpretations of the role of the trade in slaves and to indicate, on the