Most important issues of today's world - such as development, human rights, and cultural pluralism - bear the unmistakable stamp of the transatlantic slave trade. In particular Africa's state of development can only be properly understood in the light of the widespread dismantling of African societies and the methodical and lasting human bloodletting to which the continent was subjected by way of the trans-Saharan and transatlantic slave trade over the centuries. But this greatest displacement of population in history also transformed the vast geo-cultural area of the Americas and the Caribbean.

In this volume, one result of UNESCO's project Memory of Peoples: The Slave Route, scholars and thinkers from Africa, the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean have come together to raise some crucial questions and offer new perspectives on debates that have lost none of their urgency.