Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links

A methodological and empirical argument that specific African ethnicities, regional clusters, and linguistic continuities remained historically meaningful in the Americas and must be restored to view rather than dissolved into an undifferentiated creolized mass. For Saint-Domingue, Hall explains why early Bight of Benin arrivals provided the deep framework that became Rada Vodou, why later West-Central African demographic weight intensified Kongo influence without erasing earlier strata, and why colonial ethnic labels such as Arada, Nago, and Kongo are distortive but still analytically usable.