African Women in the Atlantic World: Property, Vulnerability & Mobility, 1660-1880 (Western Africa Series, 13)

Book Synopsis: An innovative and valuable resource for understanding women's roles in changing societies, this book brings together the history of Africa, the Atlantic, and gender before the 20th century. It explores trade, slavery, and migration in the context of the Euro-African encounter.

HONORABLE MENTION FOR AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW BEST AFRICA-FOCUSED ANTHOLOGY OR EDITED COLLECTION, 2019 While there have been studies of women's roles in African societies and of Atlantic history, the role of women in West and West Central Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition remains relatively unexamined. This book brings together scholars from Africa, North and South America, and Europe to show, for the first time, the ways in which African women participated in economic, social, and political spaces in Atlantic coast societies.

Focusing on diversity and change, and going beyond the study of wealthy merchant women, the contributors examine the role of petty traders and enslaved women in communities from Sierra Leone to Benguela. They analyze how women in Africa used the opportunities offered by relationships with European men, Christianity, and Atlantic commerce to negotiate their social and economic positions; consider the limitations which early colonialism sought to impose on women and the strategies they employed to overcome them; the factors which fostered or restricted women's mobility, both spatially and socially; and women's economic power and its curtailment.

Mariana P. Candido is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame; Adam Jones recently retired as Professor of African History and Culture History at the University of Leipzig. In association with The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame