Journal
Research notes, archive discoveries and launch news.
Cartography9 min read
A Dutchman, a German, a Frenchman and an Englishman, working from different ports and different politics, all engrave the same name onto the Bight of Benin. None of them was arguing a thesis. That is exactly why it matters.
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Arabic sources8 min read
From the twelfth-century description of the Niger corridor to the North African historians of the following centuries, Muslim scholarship records Israelite communities on the Egypt–Nubia–Upper Guinea roads as a matter of fact, not of controversy.
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Antiquity7 min read
Hadrian did not merely defeat a revolt. He legislated a people out of its own geography — and in doing so set in motion the longest walk in this book.
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Atlantic centuries8 min read
The Atlantic trade is told as a story of departure. For a significant number of captives, it was a story of turning around — west of the kingdom of Benin, south of the Sokoto caliphate, and away from the sea.
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Method10 min read
Every serious thesis deserves its strongest opponents. Here are the four objections raised most often against this book — and precisely what the evidence does and does not allow me to say in reply.
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Oral tradition6 min read
The epic of Engong is magnificent — and that is precisely the problem. What happens when a borrowed splendour is asked to stand in for a memory of exile?
Read the postField notes, archive finds and launch news, roughly twice a month.