Papers presented at a conference held Feb. 2001 at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Sylviane A. Diouf -- Pt. 1. Defensive Strategies -- 1. Lacustrine Villages in South Benin as Refuges from the Slave Trade / Elisee Soumonni -- 2. Slave-Raiding and Defensive Systems South of Lake Chad from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century / Thierno Mouctar Bah -- 3. The Myth of Inevitability and Invincibility: Resistance to Slavers and the Slave Trade in Central Africa, 1850-1910 / Dennis D. Cordell -- 4. The Impact of the Slave Trade on Cayor and Baol: Mutations in Habitat and Land Occupancy / Adama Gueye -- 5. Defensive Strategies: Wasulu, Masina, and the Slave Trade / Martin A. Klein -- Pt. 2. Protective Strategies -- 6. The Last Resort: Redeeming Family and Friends / Sylviane A. Diouf -- 7. Anglo-Efik Relations and Protection against Illegal Enslavement at Old Calabar, 1740-1807 / Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson -- Pt. 3. Offensive Strategies -- 8. Igboland, Slavery, and the Drums of War and Heroism / John N. Oriji -- 9. "A Devotion to the Idea of Liberty at Any Price": Rebellion and Antislavery in the Upper Guinea Coast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries / Ismail Rashid -- 10. Strategies of the Decentralized: Defending Communities from Slave Raiders in Coastal Guinea-Bissau, 1450-1815 / Walter Hawthorne -- 11. The Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Role of the State / Joseph E. Inikori -- 12. Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade / David Richardson -- Epilogue: Memory as Resistance: Identity and the Contested History of Slavery in Southeastern Nigeria, an Oral History Project / Carolyn A. Brown.

"Fighting the Slave Trade is the first book to explore in a systematic manner the strategies Africans used to protect and defend themselves and their communities from the onslaught of the Atlantic slave trade and how they assaulted it. It challenges widely held myths of African passivity and general complicity in the trade and shows that resistance to enslavement and to involvement in the slave trade was much more pervasive than has been acknowledged by the orthodox interpretation of historical literature." "Focused on West Africa, these essays examine in detail the defensive, protective, and offensive strategies of individuals, families, communities, and states. Some chapters discuss the manipulation of the environment, resettlement, the redemption of captives, the transformation of social relations, political centralization, and marronage. Others deal with violent assaults on ships and entrepots, shipboard revolts, and controlled participation in the slave trade as a way to procure the means to attack it."--BOOK JACKET.