Search

African history and world history each became substantial fields of historical study in the aftermath of the Second World War. African history organized rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, an era dominated by modernization-thinking. World history developed slowly until the 1990s, then quickly expanded and generated institutional homes in a time of globalization-thinking. This piece considers issues of time, scale, and scholarly diversity within the two fields. The conclusion argues that world historians should pay more attention to Africa and that African historians should do more to set the African past in a global context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article assesses the spread and emergence of Homo sapiens or modern humans. There are major gaps in understanding of human expansion. While it is accepted that humanity came from Africa, there remain disagreements on the path and timing of migration from Africa to other regions. The maps and descriptions of early human migration merely suggested a general dispersion from the continent to other directions. However, linguistics presents a potential to clarify the paths of early human migration, which began with the movement of Africa's densest human population from equatorial to the northern savannas.

Focuses on the transformations in African slavery in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries in the face of changing economic, demographic and political conditions. Dimensions of the export trade in African slaves; Increase in slave prices in the 18th century; Legal constraints on slave imports in Cuba and Brazil by the mid-19th century.

An essay is presented on human migration in different eras, including the Pleistocene era, the Early Holocene era, and the mid-Holocene era. It states that during the long term, human migration has been affected considerably by changing climatic conditions, and the development of new technologies. Other topics discussed include agricultural migrations in the mid-Holocene era, migration of Bantu-speaking people of Africa, and the Indo-Iranian migrations of Central and South Asia.