ABSTRACT
Africa has a special place in the world history of migration in several respects. Studies on early migration based on patterns of biological evolution, and on genetic mapping, also contribute to an emerging pattern. Slavery and the slave trade entered into African migrations a little after the fifth century a.d., when camels first became available in the Sahara and North Africa. The importance of places like sub-Saharan Africa and Ukraine as sources of slaves over several centuries raises an important question for the world history of migration. The earlier phase was perhaps the more important of the two, because it set the patterns of slavery and the slave trade within a plantation complex—patterns that would mold the massive intercontinental migration of the decades between 1680 and 1860. By the early nineteenth century, the pattern of secondary empire began to emerge in tropical Africa as well, just when the Atlantic slave trade was drawing to an end.
