From the sixteenth to early-nineteenth century, four times more Africans
than Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. While this
forced migration stripped slaves of their liberty, it failed to destroy
many of their cultural practices, which came with Africans to the New
World. In Working the Diaspora, Frederick Knight examines work cultures
on both sides of the Atlantic, from West and West Central Africa to
British North America and the Caribbean.
Knight demonstrates that the knowledge that Africans carried across the
Atlantic shaped Anglo-American agricultural development and made
particularly important contributions to cotton, indigo, tobacco, and
staple food cultivation. The book also compellingly argues that the work
experience of slaves shaped their views of the natural world. Broad in
scope, clearly written, and at the center of current scholarly debates,
Working the Diaspora challenges readers to alter their conceptual
frameworks about Africans by looking at them as workers who, through the
course of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation labor, shaped the
development of the Americas in significant ways.