Africa in an Age of Transition

 Explain the Slave Trade  Explain the political and social structures of Africa  Analyze the effects of the slave trade

 Primary Market for African slaves was Southwest Asia.  Demand for slaves changed with the discovery of the Americas 1490s and the planting of sugarcane there.  Sugarcane was introduced to Europe from Southwest Asia.  Plantations were established to grow sugarcane.

 Slave trade was done utilizing triangular trade, the pattern of trade connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas.  The journey of slaves from Africa to America was called the Middle Passage  Page 416  16 th century-275,000  17 th - 1,000,000  18 th - 6,000,000  As many as 10 million slaves were brought to the Americas between the early 16 th and late 19 th centuries.

 Early slaves were mostly prisoners of war.  Later slaves were from coastal regions, purchased from merchants at slave markets, but as demand increased, they had to travel farther inland.  Local rulers were concerned about the slave trade on their societies.

 African societies were impacted in the following ways:  Warfare increased  Areas were depopulated  Art and Culture declined.

 Generally, European influence did not extend beyond the coastal region.  By the 16 th century, monarchy and kinship alliances became common.  Ashanti, a Gold Coast state, was independent small states linked together by kinship ties and subordinated to the king.

 Europeans often caused indirect changes.  In the western Sahara, for example, trade routes shifted towards the coast, leading to a weakening of the old Songhai trading empire and the emergence of a new Moroccan dynasty in the late 16 th century.  Eventually the Moroccans were forced to leave, but Songhai was beyond recovery.

 Foreigners also impacted African religious beliefs.  Islamic culture had more of an impact than European.  In North Africa, Islam continued to expand. Muslim beliefs became dominant along the northern coast and spread southward into the states of West and East Asia.

 Although their voyages centered on trade within the East, Europeans were also interested in spreading Christianity.  The Portuguese engaged in some missionary activity, but the English, Dutch, and French made little effort to combine their trading activities with the Christian message.

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