What do you think?
Rate this book
Unbroken Chains: A 5,000-Year History of African Enslavement
Slavery has torn apart African societies since at least 2,500 BCE and continues to the present day. It afflicted peoples from Egypt to the Cape; from Mauritania to Somalia. Yet most writing covers just one fraction of this – the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The far longer, and almost as numerous, slavery in the Indian Ocean has only recently received much attention. Even less is coverage is given to Africa’s internal slavery: from the Ethiopian kings who enslaved conquered Oromo peoples, to the Sokoto Caliphate which captured non- Muslims in jihad. Finally, there is the enslavement of Europeans by the Barbary corsairs of North Africa, who raided as far as Iceland and Britain – bringing them into conflict with the United States. In 1794, in response to Algerian seizures of American ships, Congress authorised the construction of the first 6 ships of the U.S. Navy.
International concern has moved from traditional to modern slavery, leaving today’s African chattel slaves with few international champions. The United Nations and African Union are too embarrassed to confront the African states continuing to permit this practice. The book will use illustrations, maps and tables to provide an accessible introduction to this subject.
The far longer, and almost as numerous, slavery in the Indian Ocean has only recently received much attention. Even less is coverage is given to Africa’s internal slavery: from the Ethiopian kings who enslaved conquered Oromo peoples, to the Sokoto Caliphate which captured non- Muslims in jihad. Finally, there is the enslavement of Europeans by the Barbary corsairs of North Africa, who raided as far as Iceland and Britain – bringing them into conflict with the United States. In 1794, in response to Algerian seizures of American ships, Congress authorised the construction of the first 6 ships of the U.S. Navy.
International concern has moved from traditional to modern slavery, leaving today’s African chattel slaves with few international champions. The United Nations and African Union are too embarrassed to confront the African states continuing to permit this practice. The book will use illustrations, maps and tables to provide an accessible introduction to this subject.
- GenresNonfiction
412 pages, Hardcover
First published August 28, 2025
2 people are currently reading
26 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 13, 2025
The title of this book seems teleological at first glance, but it’s actually a microhistory instead of an account about the inevitability of African people being exploited in the slave trade. Despite the subtitle, most of the book focuses on late antiquity onwards. The book is largely a basic telling of history, as the stated intent is to produce an account of the history of slavery within Africa in one place.
The author is, by training, a journalist specializing in South Africa, which is evident in the prevalence of “as so-and-so scholar writes” and the long excerpted quotations. As a journalist, the writing is also dispassionate in a way that some readers will dislike, but which I appreciated: a not insignificant amount of writing on slavery, even by academics, is highly emotional and often leads to listing the many injustices of slavery instead of actual analysis. In a similar vein, I was relieved that Plaut largely eschews currently popular terms such as “enslaved people” or “enslaver”. I know this is a highly contested issue, especially in America, but to me such terms are not only grammatically awkward, but misguided whitewashing based on broad assumptions on the semantics of “slave”.
The book is mostly arranged geographically, with the unfortunate side effect that chronology is not always followed, so it is not uncommon for centuries to go back and forth between paragraphs within the same chapter. The result is a narrative often a bit disjointed, no doubt because of the enormity of the topic. Despite the lamentations about the ‘tyranny of the Atlantic’, I found the section about the transatlantic slave trade to be the best written and organized, possibly because of how well-studied it is. However, the reader who is able to keep everything together will be rewarded with interesting information. Most striking to me, as a twenty first century reader wary of white savior narratives, was the freed slaves thanking Queen Victoria “for all that She and England have done for us… express to the Queen our thanks for our freedom and to England our gratitude to those English Sailors who were killed and wounded, fighting that we might be free” on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee, despite Plaut’s less optimistic assessment of Britain’s efforts.
If the book has a thesis, it is that narratives of African slavery must move beyond their focus on Europe and the transatlantic slave trade to consider other periods and actors often left out of official discourses, such as Muslims. While not a bad proposition, I feel that this, and the ‘5000’ years in particular, could have been better explored. The section about ancient Egypt, for instance, might have benefited from discussion of the debated and unclear Egyptian slavery terminology. I was also puzzled by Plaut’s insistence that the workers building the Pyramids were skilled, honored and well treated. Our knowledge of the working conditions of these people are largely circumstantial, but from other periods in ancient Egypt we know that the corvée laborers mostly responsible for building large public works were not treated very well at all.
All in all, while those familiar with the history of slavery may not find this book’s propositions radical, Plaut has succeeded in his stated writing aim, and it will hopefully enrich others and add to the ongoing controversy about slavery.
The author is, by training, a journalist specializing in South Africa, which is evident in the prevalence of “as so-and-so scholar writes” and the long excerpted quotations. As a journalist, the writing is also dispassionate in a way that some readers will dislike, but which I appreciated: a not insignificant amount of writing on slavery, even by academics, is highly emotional and often leads to listing the many injustices of slavery instead of actual analysis. In a similar vein, I was relieved that Plaut largely eschews currently popular terms such as “enslaved people” or “enslaver”. I know this is a highly contested issue, especially in America, but to me such terms are not only grammatically awkward, but misguided whitewashing based on broad assumptions on the semantics of “slave”.
The book is mostly arranged geographically, with the unfortunate side effect that chronology is not always followed, so it is not uncommon for centuries to go back and forth between paragraphs within the same chapter. The result is a narrative often a bit disjointed, no doubt because of the enormity of the topic. Despite the lamentations about the ‘tyranny of the Atlantic’, I found the section about the transatlantic slave trade to be the best written and organized, possibly because of how well-studied it is. However, the reader who is able to keep everything together will be rewarded with interesting information. Most striking to me, as a twenty first century reader wary of white savior narratives, was the freed slaves thanking Queen Victoria “for all that She and England have done for us… express to the Queen our thanks for our freedom and to England our gratitude to those English Sailors who were killed and wounded, fighting that we might be free” on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee, despite Plaut’s less optimistic assessment of Britain’s efforts.
If the book has a thesis, it is that narratives of African slavery must move beyond their focus on Europe and the transatlantic slave trade to consider other periods and actors often left out of official discourses, such as Muslims. While not a bad proposition, I feel that this, and the ‘5000’ years in particular, could have been better explored. The section about ancient Egypt, for instance, might have benefited from discussion of the debated and unclear Egyptian slavery terminology. I was also puzzled by Plaut’s insistence that the workers building the Pyramids were skilled, honored and well treated. Our knowledge of the working conditions of these people are largely circumstantial, but from other periods in ancient Egypt we know that the corvée laborers mostly responsible for building large public works were not treated very well at all.
All in all, while those familiar with the history of slavery may not find this book’s propositions radical, Plaut has succeeded in his stated writing aim, and it will hopefully enrich others and add to the ongoing controversy about slavery.
Displaying 1 of 1 review