The Gift

How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-108-83929-7
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 307 Seiten, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 420 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies on the African Diaspora

The Gift explores how objects of prestige contributed to cross-cultural exchanges between Africans and Europeans during the Atlantic slave trade. An eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword, commissioned in the port of La Rochelle by French traders, was offered as a gift to an African commercial agent in the port of Cabinda (Kingdom of Ngoyo), in twenty-first century Angola. Slave traders carried this object from Cabinda to Abomey, the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey in twenty-first century's Republic of Benin, from where French officers looted the item in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on a rich set of sources in French, English, and Portuguese, as well as artifacts housed in museums across Europe and the Americas, Ana Lucia Araujo illuminates how luxury objects impacted European–African relations, and how these economic, cultural, and social interactions paved the way for the European conquest and colonization of West Africa and West Central Africa.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Araujo, Ana Lucia

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments; Introduction: On Gifts and the Atlantic Slave Trade; 1. The Loango Coast and the Rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade; 2. La Rochelle and Atlantic Africa; 3. Slave Traders Turned Pirates; 4. Deciphering the Gift; 5. A Displaced Gift; 6. Ngoyo Meets Dahomey; Conclusion: Objects that Shaped the Slave Trade and Colonialism; Bibliography; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Araujo, Ana Lucia
Ana Lucia Araujo is a Professor of History at Howard University. A specialist on the history and memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, she has authored and edited thirteen books.