Joseph C. Miller

Leading scholar in early African history and the world history of slavery. His work focuses on the slave trade and slavery, especially involving the South Atlantic. His work has been critical for scholars working on the history of slavery in south-central Africa (Angola, Congo) as well as for Brazil, and for comparativists. His book Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade (1730- 1830) won the 1989 Melville Herskovits Prize in African Studies. He also has published two monographs, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola (1976) and The Problem of Slavery as History (2012) which was selected as Choice Outstanding Academic Title. For decades, he published bibliographies of scholarly works on slavery worldwide in all western European languages.  As an Africanist he has been concerned to understand Africans' past in rigorously historical terms parallel to, and parts of, the global historical processes familiar in other fields.  A recent summary effort appeared in his edited Princeton Companion to Atlantic History (2015).