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Lovejoy, Paul E. and Falola, Toyin (eds.), Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa (Trenton, NJ, 2003). The major source on the history of debt bondage south of the Sahara.Google Scholar

Manning, Patrick, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge, 1990). A concise overview.Google Scholar

Meillassoux, Claude, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold, Dasnois, Alide (tr.) (Chicago, IL, 1991). A major interpretation of African slavery, including Meillassoux’s thesis that slavery was the most fundamental form of private property in Africa.Google Scholar

Miers, Suzanne and Klein, Martin A. (eds.), Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa (London, 1999).Google Scholar

Miers, Suzanne and Kopytoff, Igor (eds.), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, WI, 1977). A collection of early studies, including an influential interpretative essay by the editors.Google Scholar

Miers, Suzanne and Roberts, Richard (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, WI, 1988). Together with Miers and Klein, this provides a valuable framework plus case studies on the regionally and socially uneven decline of slavery in sub-Saharan Africa.Google Scholar

Stilwell, S., Slavery and Slaving in African History (Cambridge, 2014). Recent overview.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Austin, Gareth, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807–1956 (Rochester, NY, 2005). The economics and political economy of the existence and growth of slavery in a major West African kingdom, and of its eventual decline in the double context of colonial rule and the adoption of export agriculture.Google Scholar

Cooper, Frederick, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, CT, 1977). A pioneering study, with an equally important sequel: Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya 1890–1925 (New Haven, CT, 1980).Google Scholar

Deutsch, Jan-Georg, Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa c.1884–1914 (Oxford, 2006). The “slow death of slavery,” German-style, in East Africa.Google Scholar

Dooling, Wayne, Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa (Athens, OH, 2007). The major analysis of abolition in the context of “European” slavery at the Cape.Google Scholar

Klein, Martin A., Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, 1998). A fine account of the persistence and decline of slavery under colonial rule.Google Scholar

Lovejoy, Paul E. and Hogendorn, Jan S., Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936 (Cambridge, 1993). Influential monograph.Google Scholar

Médard, Henri and Doyle, Shane (eds.), Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa (Oxford, 2007). Presents major research remedying the neglect of slavery in the historiography of the region.Google Scholar

Rossi, Benedetta, From Slavery to Aid: Politics, Labour, and Ecology in the Nigerian Sahel, 1800–2000 (Cambridge, 2015). An incisive study of continuity and change in subsistence and recruitment on the edge of the Sahara.Google Scholar