## Introduction  
Since the completion of UNESCO's project, which produced the admirable eight volumes of the General History of Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, there have been considerable advances in the study of Transatlantic African diaspora. The contribution of diasporic Africans to the development of cultures in the Americas has been extensively studied (Mintz and Price, 1992; Heywood, 2002; Hall, 2005; Heywood and Thornton, 2007). Growing interest in globalization as a historical process has helped to make Atlantic world history - the study of the economies and societies in the Atlantic basin as a unit of historical analysis, pioneered in the 1970s (Inikori, 1979, pp. 56-85; 1992, pp. 74-112) - one of the most rapidly expanding fields of historical scholarship (Bailyn, 2005; Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman, 2007; Bailyn and Denault, 2009; Greene and Morgan, 2009). Central to the rapidly growing literature on Atlantic world history is the development of an integrated Atlantic economy, propelled by an Atlantic market which expanded phenomenally from the sixteenth to the midnineteenth century. This chapter presents a summary discussion of the major economic issues in the more recent literature on the long-lasting global impact of the forced migration of Africans and their coerced employment in large-scale production of commodities in the Americas for Atlantic commerce, the main