Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2009 Patrick Manning
Paperback edition, 2010
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-51355-5
A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Manning, Patrick, 1941
The African diaspora: a history through culture / Patrick Manning.
p. cm. (Columbia studies in international and global history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
E-ISBN 978-0-231-14470-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-14471-1
(pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-51355-5 (e-book)
1. African diasporaHistory. 2. AfricaCivilization. 3. BlacksHistory. I. Title.
DT16.5.M35 2009
909.0496dc22
2008026555
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T he history of Africans and people of African descent, a complex story in itself, lies at the center of the history of all humanity. The tale of modernity cannot fairly be told without full attention to the African continent and peoples of African descent. This book recounts the history of black people in the six centuries since 1400, as their world brought them global connections, enslavement, industrialization, and urbanization. Rather than being a history of specific regions or nations, this is a history of the interconnections of people throughout Africa, the Americas, most of Europe, and much of Asia. The Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean, rather than separating people into isolated groups, are seen in this volume as fluid pathways to and from the continents and islands where Africans have migrated and voyaged, voluntarily and under duress, for many centuries and up to the present day.
Since this is a story of overlapping and connected lives, I have written it for an overlapping and connected set of audiences. Most basically, the book is for those who seek to inform themselves on the relationships among black communities and who have an interest in viewing the modern world with an appreciation for the experience and outlook of people throughout Africa and the African diaspora.
Dividing potential readers according to their relationship to schooling, I will assert that, first, the book is written for undergraduate students encountering this material perhaps for the first timestudents around the world who read in English. For these students, I hope the book will open new vistas about the breadth of connections in the historical past. If the quantity of detail in the book appears daunting at times, I hope it will remind readers of how much has actually occurred in the past and of how the student as historian must have the confidence to select those details that help him or her develop clear interpretations of the past. Second, the book is written for historical professionals at graduate and postgraduate levels, who may wish to focus in more detail on the interpretive arguments and nuances. For this audience, more familiar with the concepts I present, I also hope the book will show the advantages of exploring history on a scale this broad. Third, the book is intended for general readers from black and other communities who are interested in the development of the modern world as experienced by black people. The conflicts and transformations addressed in this book are those of the real world, and I hope readers of various backgrounds and professions will find the interest and the patience to explore this history of the African diaspora. And even while the history of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora is the principal focus here, the narrative has substantial implications for world history more broadly and for modernity.
The same group of potential readers can be divided according to areas of primary interest. The first general topic is the history of black peoples. This volume presents a broad overview of that history wherever blacks have been and are nowin Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the islandsand the connections of those communities to one another and to other communities. The second general topic is world history. The story of the African diaspora addresses one-sixth of humanity over the past six centuries. The analysis here of the dynamics of interaction across the large part of the world in which black people have lived identifies a set of patterns that may have been representative in many ways of the world as a whole.
The third general topic is modernity. While some debates about the miraculous birth and the special nature of the modern world are couched in obscure academic language, this topic is important to all who wish to understand the African diaspora. Modernity is the condition of life today and in the recent pasta condition filled with triumphs, complexities, and disasters in industry, science, government, and communication, bringing progress, oppression, capitalism, and inequality. Modernity is a condition that is deeply felt and almost universally experienced. Too often, however, it is denned narrowly and then explained in such a fashion as to exclude black people from it. Modernity is the overall ethos of the modern world, in economic, social, cultural, and other realms; it is an exhilarating but difficult situation. The experience of modernity is unmistakable, and it is conveyed in songs and literature in every language. The explanation of modernity, however, is open to question. Some explanations treat modernity as a break from the past, achieved by a few: this approach emphasizes the unique insights and accomplishments of genius and privilege and divides the world into the traditional and the modern. Other explanations emphasize the continuity of recent times with the more distant past and argue that the modern world was constructed through the efforts and interactions of many; such explanations divide the world into the masses and the elite and treat the elite as the beneficiaries but not necessarily the creators of modernity.
I propose an interactive view of modernity, to reveal the important place of black people in construction of the modern world. My view contrasts with the leading sociological interpretations of modernity and the leading historical interpretations of the modern world, which consign Africa and the African diaspora to the footnotes. These interpretations virtually leave Africans, the African diaspora, slavery, race, and emancipation out of their interpretationsnot simply because of respect for traditional interpretation or disregard for black history but as a result of flaws in their historical logic. They give too much attention to societies, nations, kingdoms, empires, and urban centers, and not enough attention to diasporas, networks, mixes, hinterlands, and exchanges on the roads between centers. Despite the dynamics of the world of today, the static worship of central places still reigns supreme in the academic conceptualization of society. Only when connective approaches to the past are given analytical parity with central places and ruling classes will we have a history of the past and an understanding of our present that acknowledges the acts of all our ancestors in creating our world. In short, to appreciate the history of the modern world, we need to treat diasporas with the same importance as nations.
A HISTORY THROUGH CULTURE 
