THE ATLANTIC TURN IN AFRICAN HISTORY: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTION

Abstract

The digital age presented new vistas for knowledge production as seemingly knotty academic challenges became increasingly tackled by collaborations and new ways of thinking, which were facilitated by the shrinking of geographical locations made possible by information and communication technology. In African historical scholarship, no area of research seemed to have benefitted from the digital age more than the triad relationship between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, otherwise called Atlantic History. With the aid of the computer, several scholars in distant places work[ed] synchronously or asynchronously in collating data as well as digitization projects. The result is access to troves of primary documents. One such project is the Slave Voyages Project, which contains records of thirty-five thousand slave voyages and nearly 80 percent of the entire voyages made during the trade. This has created a new interest in Atlantic history, especially the transatlantic trade in human persons. Through the materiality and scoping of memoirs of slave ship captains, slave ships’ ledgers, and European trading companies’ annual records, much light has come to be shed on war and peace in society; gender and household politics, agriculture, and livelihoods, politics and state building, among others. In this historiographical essay, I examine the gains and costs of this new rush to Atlantic history. My central argument is that despite its usefulness, it has led to the neglect of the other major arm of the exchanges between Africa and the world – the trans-Saharan trade.