African Women in the Atlantic World - (Western Africa) by Mariana P Candido & Adam Jones (Paperback)

About the Book

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 migrationin the context of the Euro-African encounter.

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 migrationin 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 Westand 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 analyse 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

Review Quotes

Originating in a series of conference panels and a workshop, African Women in the Atlantic World is an important collection of essays edited by Mariana P. Candido and Adam Jones that centre on the role of women as economic and social agents in the Atlantic world.--Canadian Journal of History

Among the very few existing edited books focusing specifically on African women, this outstanding volume will interest professors and both graduate and undergraduate students of African history and African diaspora history. Likewise, African Women in the Atlantic World will become a mandatory reading to scholars of different disciplines whose works focus on women in Africa.--African Studies Review

Mariana P. Candido and Adam Jones have compiled a superb collection of historical essays that bring much-needed attention to the extraordinary ways in which Atlantic African women shaped and were shaped by the Atlantic world.--Canadian Journal of African Studies

[An] excellent collection of essays.-- "CONNECTIONS UND H-SOZ-KUL"

This volume is a must-read for those who study and teach histories of the TAST and the Atlantic world in general.I would recommend this book to those interested in such fields as world history, the Atlantic world history, women's history, and gender history. They will find this book captivating.-- "AFRICAN STUDIES QUARTERLY"