Description: The Gift explores how objects of prestige contributed to cross-cultural exchanges between Africans and Europeans during the Atlantic slave trade. An eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword, commissioned in the port of La Rochelle by French traders, was offered as a gift to an African commercial agent in the port of Cabinda (Kingdom of Ngoyo), in twenty-first century Angola. Slave traders carried this object from Cabinda to Abomey, the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey in twenty-first century's Republic of Benin, from where French officers looted the item in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on a rich set of sources in French, English, and Portuguese, as well as artifacts housed in museums across Europe and the Americas, Ana Lucia Araujo illuminates how luxury objects impacted European-African relations, and how these economic, cultural, and social interactions paved the way for the European conquest and colonization of West Africa and West Central Africa.
Brief description: Ana Lucia Araujo is a Professor of History at Howard University. A specialist on the history and memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, she has authored and edited thirteen books.
Review Quotes: '... Araujo's combined training as a social and art historian is evident in The Gift, which is painstakingly researched, deeply analyzed, and well written.' Mary A. Afolabi, Journal of Global Slavery