Editing African diaspora (section)

== History ==
[[File:African Diaspora.jpg|thumb|18th-century painting showing a family of Africans]]

=== Dispersal through slave trade ===
{{See also|Atlantic slave trade|Trans-Saharan slave trade|Red Sea slave trade|Indian Ocean slave trade|Slavery in Africa}}

Many Africans dispersed throughout [[North America]], [[South America]], [[Europe]], and [[Asia]] during the [[Atlantic slave trade|Atlantic]], [[Trans-Saharan slave trade|Trans-Saharan]], [[Red Sea slave trade|Red Sea]] and [[Indian Ocean slave trade|Indian Ocean]] slave trades.

The earliest recorded evidence of Africans as slaves outside of Africa comes from [[Ancient Greece]] and [[Roman Empire|Rome]]. In the [[Greco-Roman world]], almost all native Africans were known primarily as [[Aethiopia|Aithiopians]], a term that refers to the constellation of Cepheus, the King of the Sky in Greek mythology. Cepheus was the Greco mythological king of Ethiopia. The constellation Cepheus, which comes from the Greek word meaning “gardener,” is home to an important variable star, Delta Cephei, after which the Cepheid variables—stars used to estimate distances in the universe—are named. Most Aithiopian slaves in the [[Greco-Roman world|Greco-Roman]] world came from [[Kushan Empire|Kush]] (modern-day [[Sudan]]), after they became [[Prisoner of war|prisoners of war]] in altercations with nearby [[Egypt]]. Archaeological evidence shows that a very small proportion of slaves in the Greco-Roman world were [[Aethiopia|Aithiopian]], in part due to the distance required for import. Aithiopian slaves were primarily engaged in domestic and entertainment work, leading archaeologists to believe that they were considered an expensive luxury. In one ostentatious display, the Roman Emperor [[Nero]] filled a theater with Aithiopian slaves to demonstrate the wealth and power of [[Rome]] to a visiting foreign king.<ref>{{Citation |title=Slavery in Antiquity |date=September 29, 2017 |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203787946-2 |work=Jews and the American Slave Trade |pages=17–32 |access-date=June 27, 2023 |publisher=Routledge |doi=10.4324/9780203787946-2 |isbn=978-0-203-78794-6 }}</ref>

At the beginning of the 8th century, Arabs took African slaves from the [[Central Africa|central]] and [[East Africa|eastern]] portions of the African continent (where they were known as the [[Zanj]]) and sold them into markets in the [[Middle East]], the [[slavery in India|Indian subcontinent]], and the [[Far East]], for [[slavery in the Umayyad Caliphate]], the [[slavery in the Umayyad Caliphate|Abbasid Caliphate]], the [[slavery in the Mamluk Sultanate|Mamluk Sultanate]] and the [[slavery in the Ottoman Empire|Ottoman Empire]]. 

Beginning in the early 15th century, Europeans captured or bought [[Africa]]n slaves from [[West Africa]] and brought them first to Europe and then, after the start of European colonization there in the late 15th century, to the Americas. The Atlantic slave trade ended in the 19th century.<ref>{{cite web | url = https://www.britannica.com/blackhistory/article-24159 | title = Historical survey > The international slave trade > Slavery | website = [[Encyclopædia Britannica]] | year = 2007 | access-date = September 30, 2007 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20070929140742/https://www.britannica.com/blackhistory/article-24159 | archive-date = September 29, 2007 | url-status=live }}</ref> The dispersal through [[slave trading]] represents the largest [[forced migrations]] in human history. The economic effect on the African continent proved devastating, as generations of young people were taken from their communities and societies were disrupted. Some communities formed by descendants of African slaves in the Americas, Europe, and Asia have survived to the present day. In other cases, native Ethnic groups of Africans intermarried with non-native Africans, and their descendants blended into the local population.

In the Americas, the confluence of multiple [[ethnic]] groups from around the world contributed to multi-ethnic societies. In [[Central America|Central]] and [[South America]], most people are descended from European, [[Indigenous peoples of the Americas|Native American]], and African ancestry. In 1888, in Brazil nearly half the population descended from African slaves, the variation of physical characteristics extends across a broad range. In the United States, there was historically a greater European colonial population in relation to [[African immigration to the United States|African slaves]], especially in the [[Northern Tier (United States)|Northern Tier]]. There was considerable racial intermarriage in [[colonial Virginia]], and other forms of racial mixing during the slavery and post-[[American Civil War|Civil War]] years. [[Jim Crow laws|Jim Crow]] and [[anti-miscegenation laws]] passed after the 1863–1877 [[Reconstruction era (United States)|Reconstruction era]] in the [[Southern United States|South]] in the late-19th century, plus waves of vastly increased [[immigration]] from Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, maintained much distinction between racial groups. In the early-20th century, to institutionalize [[racial segregation]], most southern states adopted the "[[one drop rule]]", which defined and recorded anyone with any discernible African ancestry as "black", even those of obvious majority native European or of majority-Native-American ancestry.<ref name="Olson">
{{cite book
 | title = Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins
 |last = Olson | first = Steve
 | publisher = [[Houghton Mifflin Company]]
 | isbn = 978-0-618-35210-4 | year = 2003
 | pages = [https://archive.org/details/mappinghumanhist00stev/page/54 54–69]
 | url = https://archive.org/details/mappinghumanhist00stev/page/54
}}
</ref>
One of the results of this implementation was the loss of records of Native-identified groups, who were classified only as black because of being mixed-race.<ref>{{Cite web |title=One drop & one hate |url=https://www.amacad.org/publication/one-drop-one-hate |access-date=May 22, 2022 |website=American Academy of Arts & Sciences |date=January 2005 |language=en}}</ref>

=== Dispersal through voluntary migration ===
{{Further|Emigration from Africa}}
From the very onset of Spanish exploration and colonial activities in the Americas, Africans participated both as voluntary expeditionary and as slave laborers.<ref name="warren">{{cite book |title = The Conquest of Michoacán |isbn = 978-0-8061-1858-1 |first = J. Benedict |last = Warren |publisher = [[University of Oklahoma Press]] |year = 1985 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |first = James |last = Krippner-Martínez |title = The Politics of Conquest: An Interpretation of the Relación de Michoacán |journal = The Americas |volume = 47 |issue = 2 |date = October 1990 |pages = 177–97 |doi = 10.2307/1007371 |jstor = 1007371 |s2cid = 146963730 }}</ref> [[Juan Garrido]] was such an African [[conquistador]]. He crossed the Atlantic as a [[freedman]] in the 1510s and participated in the [[siege of Tenochtitlan]].<ref>{{cite book |title = Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience |author1 = Kwame Anthony Appiah |author-link = Kwame Anthony Appiah |author2 = Henry Louis Gates |author2-link = Henry Louis Gates |page = 327 }}</ref> Africans had been present in Asia and Europe long before Columbus's travels. In the late 20th century, Africans began to emigrate to Europe and the Americas in increasing numbers, constituting new African diaspora communities not directly connected with the slave trade.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora {{!}} Perspectives on History {{!}} AHA |url=https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-1998/defining-and-studying-the-modern-african-diaspora |access-date=May 22, 2022 |website=www.historians.org}}</ref>