Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South ...

which French influence predominated. With the exception of Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Serge Daget, and, more recently, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, French historians did not enter the debate on the volume of the slave trade and its demographic impact on Africa. The work of anthropologists such as Marc Augé, Jean Bazin, Michel Izard, Emmanuel Terray, and Claude Meillassoux was crucial for the development of the African history field in France, although the history of precolonial Africa “has never been successfully established in France as a distinct methodological, or even simply empirical field.”²⁰ The journal Cahiers d'Études Africaines, created in 1960, was an important platform for colonial and postcolonial African studies where English-speaking historians also frequently participated. However, debates on the volume of the slave trade and the demographic impact of that trade were absent because the research published by the journal has a multidisciplinary perspective (literature, arts, languages, anthropology, and history).

The dominance of scholarship in English can be explained by the growth of the American and British academic systems, which include a large number of institutions, graduate programs, professional associations, annual academic meetings, and academic journals. The emergence of historical demography as a discipline and the development of electronic databases required important investments, and North American and British scholars became pioneers in the field.

Since the 1990s, despite the continued dominance of English-language academic works, the number of studies on slavery conducted by African and Latin American historians has increased. North American and European sociologists and anthropologists have been conducting research in Brazil since the 1940s, and during the 1980s historians began research studies in Brazilian archives. During the 1990s, new research on Brazilian slavery and the slave trade emerged in Brazilian universities along with new graduate programs. The need to include new data on the volume of the Brazilian slave trade also helped Brazilian scholars to become members of internationally based research teams. During this same period, historians of francophone Africa, especially from Benin and Senegal, started participating in the debates on the Atlantic slave trade and slavery on African soil.