This volume is concerned with a period of African history which has traditionally been defined by events emanating from Europe. The year 1790 roughly marks the beginnings of the effective impact of the British anti-slavery movement on West Africa, where the freed slave colony of Sierra Leone was already struggling to establish itself. Protestant missionary enterprise in West and South Africa had begun. In 1795 the British first occupied the Cape of Good Hope, while three years later Napoleon's occupation of Egypt launched the movement of ‘modernization’ in North Africa. In succeeding decades the impact of European traders, missionaries and consuls increasingly began to affect the internal social, political and economic balances within African societies. The choice of 1870 as the terminal date for this volume is obviously dictated by the beginnings of the European scramble for African territory which will be a major theme of volume 6. The period can thus be considered as one dominated by the theme of Africa's growing contact with Europe, as a time of slow penetration and preparation by Europeans for the coming of partition and colonial rule.

Such a perspective, however, offers a somewhat irrelevant pattern for the history of the continent as a whole. Though Bantu in South Africa, or Arabs in Algeria, felt the direct impact of European settler colonization, elsewhere in the continent the vast mass of Africans rarely saw a European, and Europe influenced their lives only indirectly or at second-hand, except for those who lived in coastal areas where there was a direct European presence.

THE EROSION OF SLAVERY

Africa, like Europe, is a continent which has exported millions of colonists, who through their labours and initiative created the ‘New World’ of North and South America, with all that implies for the shape of the modern world. The African emigrants, almost without exception, were taken from Africa by force, and colonized America and the Caribbean as slave labourers. Thus, whilst helping to create the New World by their labour, the historical legacy of African immigration to the American hemisphere has left deep and bitter social, economic and political problems which are still far from solution. The period 1790– 1870 represents a great watershed in this historical movement of world significance. It is not, perhaps, a theme of Africa's domestic history, but none the less one which, through its effects on the relationships of ‘white’ and ‘black’ races and their attitudes to one another, has constantly had the effect of directly influencing the development of African, as well as European and American history.

The essential feature of the period under review is that it witnessed a revolutionary transformation in the legal and civil status of Africans and people of African descent living overseas. In 1770, although there were significant groups of free ‘people of colour’ in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Britain, they were small in number, and emancipated by individual acts, as part of no movement hostile to slavery as such. In general in 1770 white people felt it to be acceptable and normal that the status of black men outside Africa should be that of slavery.