Unbroken Chains: A 5,000-Year History of African Enslavement

A new, full history of slavery in Africa, from the Pharaohs to the present. Slavery has ravaged African societies since at least 2,500 BCE, from Egypt to the Cape; from Mauritania to Somalia.Most writing covers just one fraction of this history: the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.Yet Indian Ocean slavery was equally sizeable, and far longer-lived.Historians often neglect the continent's internal practices, too--Ethiopian kingdoms enslaving conquered peoples; the Sokoto Caliphate capturing men and women on a scale matching the US plantations. Overlooked stories of enslavement matter. In 1794, Congress authorised construction of the US Navy's first six ships--to protect civilian vessels from North Africa's Barbary corsairs, who raided as far as Britain and the Caribbean, enslaving hundreds of thousands of Europeans. And, since abolition of the trans-Atlantic trade, international focus on 'modern' slavery has left Africans enslaved as chattel today with few champions.The UN and