Angolan Prince Started Campaign to End Atlantic Slave Trade Long Before Europeans Did – New Book

For centuries, it has been held that the ideas and movement for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade came from western abolitionists. No input from Africans has been acknowledged.

As a professor of African and Atlantic history, I challenge this notion in a book titled Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century. The book is based on new material found in Portuguese, Spanish and Vatican archives. Its key argument is that the ideas…