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20 results

  • Defining Regions of Pre-Colonial Africa: A Controlled Vocabulary for Linking Open-Source Data in Digital History Projects

  • Henry B. Lovejoy, Paul E. Lovejoy, Walter Hawthorne, Edward A. Alpers, Mariana Candido, Matthew S. Hopper, Ghislaine Lydon, Colleen E. Kriger, John Thornton
  • Journal:
    History in Africa / Volume 48 / June 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    25 May 2021, pp. 9-34
    • Article
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  • Regionalizing pre-colonial Africa aids in the collection and interpretation of primary sources as data for further analysis. This article includes a map with six broad regions and 34 sub-regions, which form a controlled vocabulary within which researchers may geographically organize and classify disparate pieces of information related to Africa’s past. In computational terms, the proposed African regions serve as data containers in order to consolidate, link, and disseminate research among a growing trend in digital humanities projects related to the history of the African diasporas before c. 1900. Our naming of regions aims to avoid terminologies derived from European slave traders, colonialism, and modern-day countries.

  • Introduction: “Liberated Africans” and Early International Courts of Humanitarian Effort

  • Edited by Richard Anderson, Henry B. Lovejoy
  • Book:
    Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 March 2020
    Print publication:
    02 January 2020, pp 1-22

  • Summary

    For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade involved an estimated 12.7 million enslaved Africans, while the Indian Ocean trade included more than a million people, but began much earlier and continued longer. Of the total number of people involved in these two transoceanic migrations, over one-quarter boarded slave ships after the British and US governments passed legislation restricting and ultimately prohibiting maritime human trafficking in 1807. As Britain negotiated international anti-slave-trade treaties thereafter, British, Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian, French, and US authorities began capturing ships suspected of illegal slave trading, raiding coastal barracoons, and detaining newly landed enslaved people in the Americas, Africa, the Caribbean, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean islands, Arabia, and India. In this coordinated effort, British naval courts, international mixed commissions, and local authorities decided the fate for tens of thousands of people around the Atlantic and Indian Ocean littorals. Between 1808 and 1896, this complex tribunal network “liberated” approximately two hundred thousand children, women, and men, although many more died during the Middle Passage or over the course of the judicial process. These people, frequently documented as “liberated Africans,” represent a sample of an estimated 6 percent of the total slave trade leaving Africa across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans between 1807 and 1896.

    These individuals were designated “liberated Africans,” although in fact many of those people who were removed from slave ships and coastal prisons were not actually freed but were forced into periods of apprenticeship that were often documented. The records related to this special class of individuals are scattered in many archives around the world and are written in multiple languages. Cases adjudicated before a court usually generated documentation of the conditions of enslavement along the coast of West or East Africa, the events leading up to the seizure of the slave ship or the unlocking of some coastal prisons, the judicial process resulting in emancipation, and, for some, details of subsequent forced apprenticeship, which in many circumstances amounted to periods of indentured servitude.

    Scholars have had varying interpretations of British naval interdiction and the functioning of these nineteenth-century anti-slave-trade courts. Some legal scholars have characterized the courts as ancestors of contemporary courts of human rights.

Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896
  • Edited by Richard Anderson, Henry B. Lovejoy
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 March 2020
    Print publication:
    02 January 2020
  • Interrogates the development of the world's first international courts of humanitarian justice and the subsequent "liberation" of nearly two hundred thousand Africans in the nineteenth century.

  • Redefining African Regions for Linking Open-Source Data

  • Henry B. Lovejoy, Paul E. Lovejoy, Walter Hawthorne, Edward A. Alpers, Mariana Candido, Matthew S. Hopper
  • Journal:
    History in Africa / Volume 46 / June 2019
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 April 2019, pp. 5-36

  • In recent years, an increasing number of online archival databases of primary sources related to the history of the African diaspora and slavery have become freely and readily accessible for scholarly and public consumption. This proliferation of digital projects and databases presents a number of challenges related to aggregating data geographically according to the movement of people in and out of Africa across time and space. As a requirement to linking data of open-source digital projects, it has become necessary to delimit the entire continent of precolonial Africa during the era of the slave trade into broad regions and sub-regions that can allow the grouping of data effectively and meaningfully.

  • ‘LUCUMÍ’, ‘TERRANOVA’, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE YORUBA NATION*

  • HENRY B. LOVEJOY, OLATUNJI OJO
  • Journal:
    The Journal of African History / Volume 56 / Issue 3 / November 2015
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 October 2015, pp. 353-372
    Print publication:
    November 2015

  • The etymology of ‘Lucumí’ and ‘Terranova’, ethnonyms used to describe Yoruba-speaking people during the Atlantic slave trade, helps to reconceptualize the origins of a Yoruba nation. While there is general agreement that ‘Lucumí’ refers to the Yoruba in diaspora, the origin of the term remains unclear. We argue ‘Lucumí’ was first used in the Benin kingdom as early as the fifteenth century, as revealed through the presence of Olukumi communities involved in chalk production. The Benin and Portuguese slave trade extended the use of ‘Lucumí’ to the Americas. As this trade deteriorated by 1550, ‘Terranova’ referred to slaves captured west of Benin's area of influence, hence ‘new land’. By the eighteenth century, ‘Nagô’ had replaced ‘Lucumí’, while the ‘Slave Coast’ had substituted ‘Terranova’ as terms of reference. This etymology confirms the collective identification of ‘Yoruba’ and helps trace the evolution of a transnational identity.