#  The Slave Trade from the Biafran Interior to Jamaica: Commerce, Culture Change, and Comparative Perspective 

 



**Alexander X. Byrd**

Historians interested in the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade routinely study the articulation of African culture in the Americas. This paper argues that some of the ideas, identities, and practices studied as examples of transplanted local African cultures were not in fact carried and preserved from the homelands of the enslaved; rather, they developed in transit as enslaved Africans were driven from their homelands to the coast. The cultural history of the Atlantic slave trade requires, consequently, that historians pay close attention to social and cultural exigencies inherent in the actual commerce of slave trading. **\[WP #98001\]**