Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | C | Civil War History

Editor's note: suppression of the African slave trade revisited.

Article Excerpt
Welcome to a special issue to commemorate the bicentenary of the closing of the African slave trade by the United States. On January 1, 1808, the legislation took effect that banned the importation of Africans. Although slavery continued in the Atlantic Rim, the occasion--coupled with action by Great Britain a year earlier--marked an important moment in the march toward the eventual abolition of slavery throughout the western hemisphere.

As scholars well know, the trade in Africans continued well beyond 1808, lasting legally and illegally until its close in 1867. During that time, between 2 and 3 million more Africans--a great many of them children--were taken from their homeland to the Americas. This represented a substantial portion of the 12.5 million enslaved who were carried in ships during the nearly 400 years of this largest forced migration in human history.

The focus for this issue on suppression of the trade borrows from the seminal work conducted by W. E. B. Du Bois, who published in 1896 the first professional study of the African slave trade. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America came out as the first volume in the "Harvard Historical Studies" series. Produced for his dissertation at Harvard University, it was a work of incredible breadth, tracing...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!