Cromohs - Cyber Review of Modern Historiography - contenuto non piu disponibile

It is generally believed that sub-Saharan Africa was largely unknown to \neighteenth-century Europeans except as the source of slaves, and it is largely \nabsent from philosophical history. However, eighteenth-century writings \nabout Africa provided many histories of nations with different types of \ngovernment, which belie the view of one undifferentiated mass peopled \nby savages with no history. But abolitionist writings represented Africans \nprimarily as innocent children of nature, the victims of European traders who \nprovoked wars by their Machiavellian maneuvers. This made it impossible \nto place them in a coherent historical narrative or to accord them a political \nhistory of their own, and as Africans could not be assigned a clear place in \nthe stadial scheme of history, they were generally excluded from historical \nthinking. They became childlike victims to be enslaved or, increasingly, \nconverted and civilized by the Europeans. Thinking about the Africans was \nincreasingly confined to the field of natural history and anthropology and to \ntheir place in the racial hierarchy.