Book dossier

Forced Migration

by Joseph E. Inikori

This collection of ten articles on the export slave trade from Africa serves as a vehicle for the editor's long and provocative introductory essay. The articles, originally published between I964 and I977, were selected to illustrate the editor's two major emphases: the relationship of the slave trade to Africa's nineteenth- century economic backwardness, and the importance of treating the whole of Black Africa as a region. The articles chosen are all sound contributions, and translation into English of the articles by Meillassoux and by Becker and Martin is particularly welcome. The key articles of Walter Rodney and John Fage are included in the volume, although the contents were chosen primarily to ensure balanced regional coverage rather than to reproduce the main contributions to current thinking. The central element of this volume, in contrast to most edited collections, is the introduction. Dr Inikori, always controversial in his analysis of slavery, has here set forth his most comprehensive statement on the draining demographic and economic effects of slavery in Africa: he spells out estimated magnitudes for these effects, and he draws attention to crucial assumptions on pre-slave-trade population size, and on sex ratios, mortality and fertility rates during the slave trade; he completes the argument by identifying the negative political and economic consequences of slave trade for African development. -- From https://www.jstor.org (Sep. 27, 2017).