This volume takes the African continent through the two centuries before 1790, a period when contact with Europe reached deep at only one point: trade, and above all trade in people. The editorial introduction tracks the escalation — roughly 13,000 captives shipped across the Atlantic yearly in the seventeenth century, more than 60,000 by the middle of the eighteenth — and the spread of the plantation system into the Indian Ocean.

Its emphasis falls on how much of the pace Africans still controlled. Europeans depended on African rulers and intermediaries; Benin barred the export of male captives, Loango traded ivory and copper instead, and decentralised societies could retaliate against raiders. The demographic consequences are treated as genuinely unsettled, since population figures are missing at both ends of the period. Regional chapters follow, among them a treatment of Ottoman Egypt, the Funj sultanate and Darfur.