The Roots of the African Diaspora: Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Names in the Liberated African Registers of Sierra Leone and Havana

Abstract

Europe and the Americas have long dominated studies of transatlantic exchanges and much more is known about European participation in the Atlantic world than of its African counterpart. Current knowledge of how those parts of Africa located a few miles away from the African littoral contributed to the early modern Atlantic World is particularly sparse. This is despite the fact that the slave trade was the largest branch of transatlantic migration between Columbian contact and 1870, and that it is becoming apparent that Africans and indigenous Americans helped shape the new political and economic power structures, as well as the post-Columbian worlds of culture and labor.Assessments of the impact of any group on the global stage must begin with the nature of the group itself, and thus efforts to raise the African profile in Atlantic scholarship and to focus on the agency of Africans must quickly face the contentious issue of ethnicity. From the broadest perspective, it is odd that the way the ancestors of the Atlantic World defined themselves should have become so much more contentious among Africanists and Afro-Americanists than among those scholars who study Europe and Europeans overseas. At the outset of the repeopling of the Americas, the European state existed in nascent form in only Spain, Britain, and France. The predominance of the nation-state in the way the world is organized in the twenty-first century—rather than its status in 1492—has perhaps led scholars to stress the contrasts between Africa and Europe on issues of early modern nationhood, and, more generally, human identity.