Legacies of Injustice: The African Slave Trade, Colonialism, and Today’s Human Rights

This book examines the impact of the African slave trade and colonialism on political, civil, economic, social, and environmental human rights. Using multiple combined data sets, the book demonstrates that many contemporary human rights issues stem from the impact of the African slave trade and subsequent colonialism as well as the disruption of economic and political development in colonies.

Unlike other books concerning human rights, this book views contemporary human rights issues from both historical and sociological vantage points. This important book will be of interest to students studying in courses covering human rights, Africa and Africana studies and history, comparative ethnic studies, historical sociology, and global studies of the African slave trade.

Steve Carlton-Ford is Professor of Sociology at the University of Cincinnati, USA. Much of his published work has focused cross-nationally on determinants of child mortality, an indicator of the right to life defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). His recent research examines the determinants of political, civil, social, and economic rights as described in the UDHR. He is the co-editor (with Morten Ender) of The Routledge Handbook of War and Society: Iraq and Afghanistan (Routledge, 2010) and author of The Effects of Ritual and Charisma: The Creation of Collective Effervescence and the Support of Psychic Strength (1993) and numerous journal articles.