The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (review)

Patrick Manning first became prominent as a historian of slavery and the slave trade. He has since become one of the major figures in the world history movement. With this book, he returns to his early interests, but sets them in a much broader context. By doing so, he creates a more upbeat narrative. He sees the African diaspora as a central theme in world history not only because of the role of the slave trade in creating the modern world economy, but also through the contributions to culture by such transported slaves, through their innovations, and through their struggles to create more egalitarian and tolerant societies. World history can focus on linkages or on comparison; Manning's concern is more with linkages, but he nevertheless ends up presenting a lot of comparison, because in all his chapters he is concerned with connecting events in recipient areas with Africa itself.

Though the slave trade created the diaspora, this is not a study of the trade; only one chapter is concerned exclusively with this topic. Instead of presenting a conventional linear narrative, Manning develops early on the concept of concentric circles and starts with migration within Africa and into what he calls the "Old World Diaspora," a movement of individuals in diverse directions to North Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and Europe, mostly (but not exclusively) as slaves. This is linked to the rise of empires and the exchange of food crops, animals, diseases, religion, and technology that marked the early modern world. In chapter 3, which deals with the Atlantic trade, he depicts the brutalization and degradation of the Middle Passage, but also the success of Africans in maintaining family structures and social values. He describes the implications of different demographic patterns and makes clear that at any given moment, much of the diaspora was made up of free people, largely because of high rates of manumission in the Old World diaspora and in Latin America. In 1800, only 60 percent of the black population of the Americas was servile.

Manning's chapter on the nineteenth century deals with the expansion of enslavement that occurred simultaneously with the attack on slavery and the slave trade, and the emergence of a revamped racism. Manning argues that this new racism and the accompanying patterns of discrimination were a response to the movement toward emancipation. Here again he links what is happening in the diaspora to what is happening in Africa. Thus the rise of segregation in the United States in the 1890s was paralleled by a reduction in the roles of black elites elsewhere in the diaspora and by the partition of Africa, which often was accompanied by increasing segregation. Comparison also marks the last two chapters. The period between 1900 and 1960 is seen as a diasporic struggle for citizenship, with the fight for political rights in the United States paralleling the struggles for independence in the Caribbean and Africa and the demands for greater recognition in Latin America. The last chapter deals with the struggle for equality—which Manning presents as the central theme for the period between 1960 and 2000.

There are places in the last two chapters where Manning slips into catalog mode (always a problem in books designed for use as texts), but his encyclopedic knowledge enables him to constantly pull together a coherent, if complex, picture of linkages and parallels. His epilogue presents a series of questions. He asks of history why slavery was so important, what the contributions of black communities were, and how those communities managed to make cultural advances. He then looks at the present and asks whether social equality will ever be possible, whether reparations should be given, whether racism will ever end, and whither the future of black identity. His narrative stresses hope for the dawn more than the despair of the dark night, struggle and...