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Wednesday; 20 October 2010

Andrew S. Terrell
HIST 6393: Atlantic American to 1750

Précis: Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

In Africa and Africans, John Thornton sought to reexamine traditional views of African
peoples’ impact on the Atlantic world from the Portuguese through the English and American
slave trade era. He argued that native Africans, especially the ruling class, embraced the
eventual international slave trade and actually were the initiators of the institution. From this
revisionist perspective, many preconceptions of European interactions with the African continent
over the course of four centuries are brought into question.
To deal with the expected problems of his thesis, Thornton analyzes the era before mass
European trade, and later how colonial America was shaped by longstanding cultures of differing
zones of Africa. Thornton first looks at the real impact of European navigation on 15th century
Africans who simply did not have such technology and grasp of stellar navigation. This does
not, however, mean that the Europeans were a far superior people even at early interactions.
Rather, Thornton convincingly shows how scholars have falsely pinpointed Europeans as the
root cause of underdevelopment in African nations. He goes on to show with empirical evidence
how equal in military strength different European empires were to their African contemporaries.
Another contentious point Thornton dismisses with his work was the economic situation
of even the earliest of European interactions. He ties his former argument over military equality
to his assertion that African leaders were not compelled by any European to sell slaves. Frankly,
he goes at length to defend his theory that the Europeans possessed no economic asset of great
interest for Africans other than a few luxury pieces to the ruling classes. Furthermore, slavery as
a working institution was commonplace in ancient Africa. Wealth and social supremacy rested
on the control of people rather than land because Africa was not at large a subsistence economy.
Geographically, Thornton saw Africa split into three zones divided along linguistics,
ceramic stylings, religion and other large parts of typical cultural divides. Ships carrying slaves
to the New World would often end up with most of their slaves coming from one zone at a time
which allowed for a large transnational movement of Africans. From this perspective, Thornton
points out how first generation slaves may have been closer to European society and religious
beliefs because they were already exposed to the institutions in their homeland. The new African
America was also more homogenous than previously thought because of the similarities between
Africans as they formed their communities in the Americas along the same cultural divides found
in the African continent.
What Thornton seemed to introduce to revisionist historians was a notion that Africans
played a much larger part in the shaping of the Atlantic World than previously believed. His
latter half of the book focusing on the New World experiences further defend his larger theme of
African importance. That such a civilization could be moved and still maintain many aspects of
its former home is a stunning achievement of cultural history.