Karen E. Fields

“Bordeaux’s Africa” offers a new conceptualization of the African Diaspora. Instead of focusing on the the “triangle” of the triangular trade along its Africa-to-America base, this book takes as its vantage-point one European apex, Bordeaux. From that standpoint, slave-trading and slavery come into view as a vast movement of things along the triangle’s two legs: one outbound, the route of things to buy people with; and the other inbound, the route of things the bought people have produced. By reconstructing production and/or acquisition of outbound commodities for the slave trade—here, wine/brandy, gunpowder, and cotton cloth—it becomes possible to register, within Europe, the creation of the African Diaspora. The same applies to inbound commodities.