Patrick Manning charts a history of African migration that refuses to divide the diaspora into the experiences of separate regions and nations. Taking the African continent as a whole, Manning follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. His six-hundred-year history shows that rather than isolating blacks from each other, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean fueled dynamic interactions between black communities and cultures, and that these patterns echoed a number of connected diasporas concurrently taking shaping across the globe. In rescuing this story from the margins, Manning also makes clear that black migration is inextricably bound to the rise of modernity, especially with regard to the processes of industrialization and urbanization.
Beginning in 1400, Manning organizes his history chronologically, tracing five central themes throughout: the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community; discourses on race; changes in economic circumstance; the character of family life; and the evolution of popular culture. His approach builds new connections between the histories of seemingly disparate and isolated worlds. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, slavery came under attack in North America, South America, southern Africa, West Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and India, with former slaves rising to positions of political prominence. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century, the near-elimination of slavery brought new forms of discrimination that removed almost all blacks from government. Manning's broad study highlights the tremendous influence of the African diaspora on world history and demonstrates that the advent of modernity cannot be imaginatively and comprehensively engaged without taking the African peoples and the African continent as a whole into account.
