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The content derives from the British Academy’s public lecture programme which presents specialist research in an accessible manner. The papers range in subject matter over music, psychology, history, economics and linguistics, demonstrating the depth and breadth of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that the British Academy champions.

This book, which provides a collection from scholars in the field of the precolonial history of Western Africa (the region between Senegal and Sierra Leone), aims to bring the history of the region to wider historical attention. It spans the whole pre-colonial period between the first Portuguese voyages of discovery and the transition to legitimate commerce in the 19th century, and as a whole offers a synthesis of the importance of this region of Africa in the emergence of the Atlantic world between the 15th and 19th centuries. The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 looks at African‐European relations from a comparative perspective, analysing the themes of creolisation and Euro-African communities in Western Africa and beyond, in Elmina and Sao Tome. Part 2 looks at the Atlantic dimension of trade, with chapters looking at Dutch, English and French engagements with the region. Part 3 looks at island contexts, and the role of the Capeverde islands as transshippers of culture and connections to the Caribbean. Part 4 looks at the trade in slaves and commodities, and the effects this commerce had on African societies. Finally, Part 5 looks at Western Africa in the era of the transition to ‘legitimate commerce’ in the run-up to the colonial era.

The role and consequences of slavery in the history of Africa have been brought to the fore recently in historical, anthropological, and archaeological research. Public remembrances — such as Abolition 2007 in Great Britain, which marked the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act and which this book also commemorates — have also stimulated considerable interest. There is a growing realisation that enslavement, whether as part of a sliding scale of ‘rights in persons’ or due to acts of violence, has a history on the African continent that extends back in time long before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The nature of such enslavement is obscured by the lack of resolution in historical sources before the middle of the second millennium ad. Ground-breaking archaeological research is now building models for approaching slave labour systems via collaboration with historians and the critical scrutiny of historical data. Generally, such new research focuses at the landscape scale; rather than attempting to find physical evidence of slavery per se, it assesses the settlement systems of slavery-based economies, and the depopulation and abandonment that followed from wars of enslavement. This book offers chapters on recent archaeological studies of slavery, slave resistance and its contemporary commemoration, alongside archaeological assessments of the economic, environmental, and political consequences of slave trading in a variety of historical and geographical settings.