In his History of the Dispersion of the Jews; of Modern Egypt; and of other African Nations (1802), William Mavor established a direct connection between the biblical dispersal of Jews from Egypt and the experiences of dispersal and dispossession of thousands of Africans during the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade. Six decades later, in 1868, the Sierra Leoneon doctor James Africanus Horton advanced a similar exegesis in his text West African Countries and Peoples, while Edward Wilmot Blyden's Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887) described the African's existence within the diaspora as being ‘not unlike that of God's ancient people, the Hebrews’, yet emphasized their continued condition of servitude: ‘The Negro is found in all parts of the world. He has gone across Arabia, Persia and India and China. He has crossed the Atlantic to the western Hemisphere…. He is everywhere a familiar object, and he is, everywhere out of Africa, the servant of others.’ Published in 1910, Sir Henry Johnston's pioneering study The Negro in the New World located the concept of the African diaspora within the context of the atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade, whilst W. E. B. Du Bois's autobiographical work Dusk of Dawn (1940) described the pain of segregation experienced by blacks in the new world:

At the International Congress of African Historians held in Dares Salaam in 1965, the term ‘African diaspora’ was used to discuss the plight of blacks throughout the world, while Martin Kitson and Robert Rotberg's collection of essays The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays, published in 1976, reinforced the validity of the term within a variety of academic disciplines.