ABSTRACT
Despite the obvious importance of integrating scholarship on prenineteenth-century African societies with research on black societies in the New World, the Atlantic appears to have remained a formidable barrier to such exchange. Few Africanists can read the Caribbean and American material without wincing when it adverts to the 'African background'. For the most part such allusions are generalised, often based on rather ancient scholarship and shy of both the complexity and the dynamism of the history of Africa. This remark points no finger of blame but rather seeks to emphasise that historical studies of Africa are now so numerous, detailed and sophisticated that a researcher whose commitment is to understanding the diaspora scarcely has time to master both bodies of data. Students of African history are no more successful in their understanding of the American material. Certainly North American and Caribbean scholarship has had a profound impact upon methodology,' but the rich material on black life on the other side of the Atlantic has never been seriously combed for what it might tell us about the continent from which its subjects had been so recently and rudely forced. An ultimate and obviously desirable synthesis seems remote and it is a matter of regret that a more thorough understanding of the African elements in the world the slaves made is still denied us.
