Books and Enslavement

John Ogilby’s comprehensive travelogue of Africa helped to shape English attitudes to Africa in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although unacknowledged by Ogilby, the work was in fact a translation of a Dutch account by Olfert Dapper published in 1668. Dapper’s descriptions of African peoples and their customs, religions, and systems of governance were accompanied by elaborate maps and engraved illustrations. Like others at that time, Dapper sometimes glorified accounts of African cruelty and despotism, a narrative that proved helpful to Europeans who sought to present enslavement as a means to ‘civilise’ Africans. Yet, such accounts also informed the thinking of abolitionists later in the eighteenth century who saw in them a response to the European slave economy. As early as 1704, the Dutch merchant William Bosman recognised in West Africa a cycle of violence both within and between nations, resulting from their need to defend themselves against the violence of slavers.

Author: John Ogilby
Title: Africa: being an accurate description (London, 1670)
Shelfmark: O.4.23

EnslavementO.4.23exhibition