The First Day of the Yam Custom, engraving and colored aquatint by R. Havell & Son after Thomas Edward Bowdich, in Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (London, 1819), following page 274. Courtesy Michael Graham-Stewart.

Insurrection on Board a Slave Ship, lithograph by W. L. Walton, in William Fox, A Brief History of the Wesleyan Missions on the West Coast of Africa (London, 1851), facing page 116. Courtesy of The Sheridan Libraries of The Johns Hopkins University.

Gvinea Propia, nec non Nigritiae vel Terrae Nigrorum maxima pars . . . , Nuremberg, 1743. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, digital id: g8735 ct 000313.

Chair, Asante peoples, Ghana, late 19th to early 20th century, wood, copper alloy, iron, leather, fur, and paint. H x W x D: 76.5 x 42.4 x 48.9 cm. (30 1/8 x 16 11/16 x 19 1/4 in.). Gift of Tom and Rita Bakos. 2000-19-1. Photograph by Franko Khoury. By permission of National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. Such chairs represent Asante adaptation of 17th-century European objects to specific cultural ends.

Fante fertility figure, Ghana, collected by J. J. Klejman, before 1966. Among the matrilineal Asante and Fante, women carried small, usually female, wooden figures (akua-ba), indicating both their maternal hopes and their preference for bearing girls. Courtesy of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, acc. no. 5-3810.

Kongen af Assianthe Comm af Cap Ole P. Ugland Fra Arendal, 1806. By Nicolas Cammillieri (probably depicted at Marseille harbor). Built in Finland in 1797 and named after the Asante king, who was a prominent partner in the coastal trade, this ship made three slaving voyages, the last in 1802. Courtesy of the Aust-Agder Heritage Center, Arendal, Norway, AAM.B.556.

Ignatius Sancho, 1768. Oil on canvas; by Thomas Gainsborough. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photograph copyright, National Gallery of Canada.

Rita, a Celebrated Black Beauty at Rio de Janeiro, 1822. Watercolor; by Augustus Earle. By permission of National Library of Australia.

Africa America, Aug. 20, 1807. Oil paint on glass; by W. G. Walker. This antislavery work uses classic Anglo-American turn-of-the-nineteenth-century images: a noble African chieftain in front of his hut with a crocodile behind, holding a spear and a document reading “Slave Trade abolish’d 1806”; the Indian princess “America,” holding an early American flag with tassels and pointing to a portrait of two figures, one of whom appears to be George Washington. Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, acc. no. 1997-41.

Shipping Slaves, W. Coast of Africa, 1860. Watercolor; by John Robert Mather. The ship is almost certainly L’Antonio, dubbed “the celebrated piratical slaver” by another artist. Courtesy Michael Graham-Stewart.

Fabrication de l’huile palme à Whydah, coate Oxidentale, Afrique, ca. 1845. Watercolor; Edouard-Auguste Nousveaux.The production of palm oil became one of the main growth export industries in West Africa after the slave trade became illegal. Courtesy Michael Graham-Stewart.

Detail, illustration no. 3, in Thomas Clarkson, “Lettres nouvelles sur le commerce de la Côte de Guinée,” Paris, 1789–1790. In December 1789 and January 1790, Clarkson, who had traveled to Paris to campaign for antislavery legislation, wrote thirteen letters laying out the abolitionist case. This illustration comes from the original French letters, which were never published, though a condensed translation, Letters on the slave-trade, appeared after Clarkson’s return to England. Courtesy, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.