Richard Gray's introduction and eight regional chapters carry the continent from the collapse of Songhay to the eve of abolition. Gray argues that European contact stayed shallow beyond the coastal fringe, that the missionary and diplomatic openings to Kongo and Ethiopia had closed by the later seventeenth century, and that trade was the single channel through which Europe reached deeply into African life. On the slave trade he weighs a demographic question the evidence cannot settle, citing roughly 13,000 departures a year in the seventeenth century rising past 60,000 by the mid eighteenth, and stressing that rulers, kinship obligations, calculations of a captive's productive value and hard bargaining set the pace of sales. The volume also gathers evidence of political consolidation, of internal exchange in copper, salt, kola, gold and horses that dwarfed the overseas market, and of flourishing cloth production. Fisher, Levtzion, Rodney, Birmingham, Marks, Alpers and Ehret write the regional narratives.