The Human commodity

"Societies from sub-Saharan Africa to Ottoman Turkey and from the eastern Sudan to western Morocco were actively engaged in the slave trade. These scholarly studies, drawing on diverse archival material, shed light not only on the movement of particular peoples as slaves and slave traders but also on such issues as gender and age distribution, absorption of slaves within societies, specialised slaves, prices, anti-slavery measures, and the demographic impact and mortality of slaves."--BOOK JACKET. "This volume strays beyond the strict limits of the nineteenth century and in so doing offers both a chronological perspective and an historical context for subsequent developments in the trans-Saharan slave trade. Only by placing the trans-Saharan slave trade in its wider context can we begin to piece together the web of history in which it existed."--BOOK JACKET.