T. Cary Johnson, Jr. Professor (1972)

Early Africa, Slavery, Slave Trade, World History

Office Hours: Tu 11:00-12:30 and W 1:00-3:00 and by appt.

Office: 210 Levering Hall

Phone: (434) 924-6395

Fax: (434) 924-7891

Email: jcm7avirginia.edu

Education

B.A. Wesleyan 1961
M.B.A. Northwestern 1963
M.A. Wisconsin 1967
Ph.D. Wisconsin 1972

Publications

 

"History and Africa/ Africa and History," American Historical Review, 104, 1 (1999), pp. 1-32. Presidential address, American Historical Association.

Editor (with Paul Finkelman), Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery. Macmillan, 1999.

Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography, 1900-1991. Millwood NY: Kraus International, 1993. (10,344 entries, xiii+584 pp.); Corrected, reformatted second edition, Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999.

Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography - Vol 2, 1992-96. Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. (3897 entries, xxi + 244 pp.)

Editor, Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara (for history). Macmillan, 1997.

Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830. University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

Winner of the 1989 Melville Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association. Special citation, Bolton Prize Committee, Conference of Latin American Historians.

Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Worldwide Bibliography, 1900-1982. Millwood NY: Kraus International, 1993. (10,344 entries, xiii+584 pp.)

Nominated for 1994 Conover-Porter Price (African Studies Association) Corrected, reformatted second edition, Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999

Editor of The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History. Dawson Publishing, 1980.

Slavery: A Comparative Teaching Bibliography. Crossroads Press, 1977.

Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola. Clarendon Press, 1976.

Translated as Poder Político e Parentesco. Arquivo Histórico Nacional, Angola, 1996.

More than 70 chapters, articles, and other essays.

Awards and Activities

President, African Studies Association, 2005-06

Fellow, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 2004-05

James Pinckney Harrison Professor - College of William and Mary, 2001-02

Director, NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes (“Roots: African Dimensions of the Early History and Cultures of the Americas”), 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006

President, American Historical Association, 1998.

Editor, Journal of African History, 1990-96.

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, 1990-95.

American Council of Learned Societies Travel Grants, 1980, 1985.

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, 1978-79, 1985.

National Endowment for the Humanities Research Resources Grants, 1982-83, 1984.

Current Research

A world history of slavery from the earliest human times through the nineteenth century. Hundreds of comparative studies have demonstrated the near-ubiquity of an institution once thought "peculiar" to the Old South, but few have concentrated on slavery as historical process. Strategies of slaving in the ancient Mediterranean, the Islamic world, Africa, the Renaissance Mediterranean, Brazil, the West Indies, the Indian Ocean basin, and the United States reveal recurrent intensely dynamic processes of bringing outsiders as slaves into labor vacuums created during times of rapid economic growth or political expansion. Slavery thus arguably lies at the heart of "classical Greece and Rome", the Muslim oecumene, political development in Africa, the southern European Renaissance, and the origins of the modern era on all shores of the Atlantic. Prior to the Atlantic experience, most of those enslaved were women; the males assembled in unprecedented numbers in the New World were truly new.

In the Americas, recurrent internal processes led through initial formation of captive populations, creation of cultures of slavery, definition of legal constraints, collective revolt, growth of locally born generations of slaves, and drift among many different paths toward other forms of dependent labor systems. Abolition as a government responsibility emerged with the definition of participatory civic "nation states". These profoundly historical dynamics of slavery, and the necessarily trans-regional scales on which they operated, illustrate the distinctive transcending qualities of world history, as contrasted with the comparative cultural approaches currently dominant in this important field of historical inquiry.