ABSTRACT
Located at the westernmost extension of the African continent, the region of pre-colonial Senegambia served as one of the earliest regions of Sub-Saharan Africa to come into contact with Europeans. This chapter surveys the historical literature on the role of Senegambia and Senegambians in the making of the Atlantic World. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the role of Senegambia in the transatlantic slave trade. Jones considers scholarship on the export of slaves from pre-colonial Senegal, the nature of Senegal’s Atlantic trading towns, and accounts that provide biographical sketches of Senegambian men and women in North America and the Caribbean. Jones argues for a careful consideration of local, parish, and municipal archives as a means of reconstructing the biographies of Senegambians in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic World.
