Eurafricans In Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century

Product Description From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries Luso- Africans, the descendants of Portuguese traders and African women, exercised important roles in commerce along the riverine networks of the West African coast. They were influential in the development and dissemination of the Crioulo language, the diffusion of numerous fruits, food crops and domestic animals, and influenced many African social and religious practices. When Sephardic Jews, French, Dutch, and English traders arrived in western Africa, they and their Eurafrican offspring were constrained by African societies to accommodate to the same circumstances as Portuguese and Luso-Africans. During the latter part of the eighteenth century, Eurafricans' circumstances significantly changed in places where French and British colonial officials introduced European legal codes that enabled Eurafricans to acquire freehold property, bequeath dwellings, trading vessels, and other possessions to descendants, and exercise civic responsibilities. North America: Ohio U Press Review George Brooks provides Africanists and those interested in Africa's history with a most informative book. It contains an enormous number of useful references for researchers, and effortlessly crosses and connects regional boundaries as well as chronological sequences. Appearing to be very much at ease with data culled from a large number of Portuguese, Dutch, English and French sources, the author succeeds in sustaining the main threads of his analysis throughout the book. Covering the period of the slave trade, it draws and further elaborates upon the work of Jean Boulegue, Boubacar Barry, Donald Wright, Philip Curtin, Walter Rodney, Christopher Fyfe, and many others. As such it is a timely review of a turbulent episode in West African history while focusing on lesser known groups of intermediaries that played an important, albeit generally underestimated, role in Afro-Atlantic relations. - Philip J. Havik in AFRICAN REVIEW OF BOOKS Brooks provides new historical material, notably the origins the imposition of tripartite social stratifications. ARAS Australia