The Atlantic Slave Trade

Topic 2D Sources – The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Walter Rodney – “The Unequal Partnership Between Africans and Europeans”

Walter Rodney argues that the slave trade had a profound impact on African history, and in particular he focuses on two issues. The first is demographic—the effect of the slave trade on African population levels. The second is economic—the impact on Africa’s economic development, particularly in the area of commerce. Make sure that you understand the specific arguments he is making about each of these points. What evidence does he offer to support his points? Do you find his argument convincing? Why or why not?

The European Slave Trade as a Basic Factor in African Underdevelopment

[p.135] Undoubtedly, with few exceptions such as Hawkins,* European buyers purchased African captives on the coasts of Africa and the transaction between themselves and Africans was a form of trade. It is also true that very often a captive was sold and resold as he made his way from the interior to the port of embarkation—and that too was a form of trade. However, on the whole, the process by which captives were obtained on African soil was not trade at all. It was through warfare, trickery, banditry, and kidnaping. When one tries to measure the effect of European slave trading on the African con-

[p.136] tinent, it is essential to realize that one is measuring the effect of social violence rather than trade in any normal sense of the word.

Many things remain uncertain about the slave trade and its consequences for Africa, but the general picture of destructiveness is clear, and that destructiveness can be shown to be the logical consequence of the manner of recruitment of captives in Africa. One of the uncertainties concerns the basic question of how many Africans were imported. This has long been an object of speculation, with estimates ranging from a few millions to over one hundred million. A recent study has suggested a figure of about ten million Africans landed alive in the Americas, the Atlantic islands, and Europe. Because it is a low figure, it is already being used by European scholars who are apologists for the capitalist system and its long record of brutality in Europe and abroad. In order to whitewash the European slave trade, they find it convenient to start by minimizing the numbers concerned. The truth is that any figure of Africans imported into the Americas which is narrowly based on the surviving records is bound to be low, because there were so many people at the time who had a vested interest in smuggling slaves (and withholding data). Nevertheless, if the low figure of ten million was accepted as a basis for evaluating the impact of slaving on Africa as a whole, the conclusions that could legitimately be drawn would confound those who attempt to make light of the experience of the rape of Africans from 1445 to 1870.

On any basic figure of Africans landed alive in the Americas, one would have to make several extensions—starting with a calculation to cover mortality in transshipment. The Atlantic crossing, or "Middle Passage," as it was called by European slavers, was notorious for the number of deaths incurred, averaging in the vicinity of 15 to 20 per cent. There were also numerous deaths in Africa between time of capture and time of embarkation, especially in cases where captives had to travel hundreds of miles to the coast. Most important of all (given that warfare was the principal means of obtaining captives) it is necessary to make some estimate as to the number of people killed and injured so as to extract the millions who were taken alive and sound. The resultant figure would be many times the millions landed alive outside of Africa, and it is that figure which represents the number of Africans directly removed from the population and labor force of Africa because of the establishment of slave production by Europeans.

The massive loss to the African labor force was made more critical because it was composed of able-bodied young men and young women. Slave buyers preferred their victims between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, and preferably in the early twenties; the sex ratio being about two men to one woman. Europeans often accepted younger African children, but rarely any older person. They shipped the most healthy wherever possible, taking the trouble to get those who had already survived an attack of smallpox, and who were therefore immune from further attacks of that disease, which was then one of the world's great killer diseases.

So long as the population density was low, then human beings viewed as units of labor were far more important than other factors of production such as land. From one end of the continent to the other, it is easy to find examples showing that African people were conscious that population was in their circumstances the most important factor of production. Among the Bemba, for instance, numbers of subjects were held to be more important than land. Among the Shambala of Tanzania, the same feeling was expressed in the saying "A king is people." Among the Balanta of Guinea-Bissau, the family's strength is represented by the number of hands there are to cultivate the land. Certainly, many African rulers acquiesced in the European slave trade for what they considered to be reasons of self-interest, but on no scale of rationality could the outflow of population be measured as being anything but disastrous for African societies

African economic activity was affected both directly and indirectly by population loss. For instance, when the inhabitants of a given area were reduced below a certain number in an environment where the tsetse fly was present, the remaining few had to abandon the area. In effect, enslavement was causing these people to lose their battle to tame and harness nature—a battle which is at the basis of development. Violence almost meant insecurity. The opportunity presented by European slave dealers became the major (though not the only) stimulus for a great deal of social violence between different African communities and within any given community. It took the form more of raiding and kidnaping than of regular warfare, and that fact increased the element of fear and uncertainty.

Both openly and by implication, all the European powers in the nineteenth century indicated their awareness of the fact that the activities connected with producing captives were inconsistent with

[p.138] other economic pursuits. That was the time when Britain in particular wanted. Africans to collect palm produce and rubber and to grow agricultural crops for export in place of slaves; and it was clear that slave raiding was violently conflicting with that objective in Western, Eastern, and Central Africa. Long before that date, Europeans accepted that fact when their self-interest was involved. For example, in the seventeenth century, the Portuguese and Dutch actually discouraged slave trade on the Gold Coast, for they recognized that it would be incompatible with gold trade. However, by the end of that century, gold had been discovered in Brazil, and the importance of gold supplies from Africa was lessened. Within the total Atlantic pattern, African slaves became more important than gold, and Brazilian gold was offered for African captives at Whyda (Dahomey) and Accra. At that point, slaving began undermining the Gold Coast economy and destroying the gold trade. Slave raiding and kidnaping made it unsafe to mine and to travel with gold; and raiding for captives proved more profitable than gold mining. One European on the scene noted that "as one fortunate marauding makes a native rich in a day, they therefore exert themselves rather in war, robbery and plunder than in their old business of digging and collecting gold.”

The above changeover from gold mining to slave raiding took place within a period of a few years between 1700 and 1710, when the Gold Coast came to supply about five thousand to six thousand captives per year. By the end of the eighteenth century, a much smaller number of captives were exported from the Gold Coast, but the damage had already been done. It is worth noting that Europeans sought out different parts of West and Central Africa at different times to play the role of major suppliers of slaves to the Americas. This meant that virtually every section of the long western coastline between the Senegal and Cunene rivers had at least a few years' experience of intensive trade in slaves—with all its consequences. Besides, in the history of eastern Nigeria, the Congo, northern Angola, and Dahomey, there were periods extending over decades when exports remained at an average of many thousands per year. Most of those areas were also relatively highly developed within the African context. They were leading forces inside Africa, whose energies would otherwise have gone towards their own self-improvement and the betterment of the continent as a whole.

[p.159] The changeover to warlike activities and kidnaping must have affected all branches of economic activity, and agriculture in particular. Occasionally, in certain localities food production was increased to provide supplies for slave ships, but the overall consequences of slaving on agricultural activities in Western, Eastern, and Central Africa were negative. Labor was drawn off from agriculture and conditions became unsettled. Dahomey, which in the sixteenth century was known for exporting food to parts of what is now Togo, was suffering from famines in the nineteenth century. The present generation of Africans will readily recall that in the colonial period when able-bodied men left their homes as migrant laborers, that upset the farming routine in the home districts and often caused famines. Slave trading after all meant migration of labor in a manner one hundred times more brutal and disruptive.

To achieve economic development, one essential condition is to make the maximum use of the country's labor and natural resources. Usually, that demands peaceful conditions, but there have been times in history when social groups have grown stronger by raiding their neighbors for women, cattle, and goods, because they then used the "booty" from the raids for the benefit of their own community. Slaving in Africa did not even have that redeeming value. Captives were shipped outside instead of being utilized within any given African community for creating wealth from nature. It was only as an accidental by-product that in some areas Africans who recruited captives for Europeans realized that they were better off keeping some captives for themselves. In any case, slaving prevented the remaining population from effectively engaging in agriculture and industry, and it employed professional slave-hunters and warriors to destroy rather than build. Quite apart from the moral aspect and the immense suffering that it caused, the European slave trade was economically totally irrational from the viewpoint of African development.

For certain purposes, it is necessary to be more specific and to speak of the trade in slaves not in general continent-wide terms but rather with reference to the varying impact on several regions. The relative intensity of slave-raiding in different areas is fairly well known. Some South African peoples were enslaved by the Boers and some North African Moslems by Christian Europeans, but those were minor episodes. The zones most notorious for human exports were, firstly, West Africa from Senegal to Angola along a belt

[p.140] extending about two hundred miles inland and, secondly, that part of East-Central Africa which today covers Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, northern Zambia, and eastern Congo. Furthermore, within each of those broad areas, finer distinctions can be drawn.

It might therefore appear that slave trade did not adversely affect the development of some parts of Africa, simply because exports were non-existent or at a low level. However, the contention that European slave trade was an underdeveloping factor for the continent as a whole must be upheld, because it does not follow that an African district which did not trade with Europe was entirely free from whatever influences were exerted by Europe. European trade goods percolated into the deepest interior, and (more significantly) the orientation of large areas of the continent towards human exports meant that other positive interactions were thereby ruled out.

One tactic that is now being employed by certain European (including American) scholars is to say that the European slave trade was undoubtedly a moral evil, but it was economically good for Africa. Here attention will be drawn only very briefly to a few of those arguments to indicate how ridiculous they can be. One that receives much emphasis is that African rulers and other persons obtained European commodities in exchange for their captives, and this was how Africans gained "wealth." This suggestion fails to take into account the fact that several European imports were competing with and strangling African products; it fails to take into account the fact that none of the long list of European articles were of the type which entered into the productive process, but were rather items to be rapidly consumed or stowed away uselessly; and it incredibly overlooks the fact that the majority of the imports were of the worst quality even as consumer goods—cheap gin, cheap gunpowder, pots and kettles full of holes, beads, and other assorted rubbish.

Following from the above, it is suggested that certain African kingdoms grew strong economically and politically as a consequence of the trade with Europeans. The greatest of the West African kingdoms, such as Oyo, Benin, Dahomey, and Asante are cited as examples. Oyo and Benin were great long before making contact with Europeans, and while both Dahomey and Asante grew stronger during the period of the European slave trade, the roots of their achievements went back to much earlier years. Furthermore—and this is a major fallacy in the argument of the slave-trade apologists—the fact

[p.141] that a given African state grew politically more powerful at the same time as it engaged in selling captives to Europeans is not automatically to be attributed to the credit of the trade in slaves. A cholera epidemic may kill thousands in a country and yet the population increases. The increase obviously came about in spite of and not because of the cholera. This simple logic escapes those who speak about the European slave trade benefiting Africa. The destructive tendency of slave trading can be clearly established; and, wherever a state seemingly progressed in the epoch of slave trading, the conclusion is simply that it did so in spite of the adverse effects of a process that was more damaging than cholera. This is the picture that emerges from a detailed study of Dahomey, for instance, and in the final analysis although Dahomey did its best to expand politically and militarily while still tied to slave trade, that form of economic activity seriously undermined its economic base and left it much worse off….

All of the above points are taken from books and articles published recently, as the fruit of research in major British and American universities They are probably not the commonest views even among European bourgeois scholars, but they are representative of a growing trend that seems likely to become the new accepted orthodoxy in metropolitan capitalist countries, and this significantly coincides with Europe's struggle against the further decolonization of Africa economically and mentally. In one sense, it is preferable to ignore such rubbish and isolate our youth from its insults, but unfortunately one of the aspects of current African underdevelopment is that the capitalist publishers and bourgeois scholars dominate the scene and help mold opinions the world over. It is for that reason

[p.142] that writing of the type which justifies the trade in slaves has to be exposed as racist bourgeois propaganda, having no connection with reality or logic. It is a question not merely of history but of present-day liberation struggle in Africa.

Technical Stagnation and Distortion of the African Economy in the Pre-Colonial Epoch

It has already been indicated that in the fifteenth century European technology was not totally superior to that of other parts of the world. There were certain specific features which were highly advantageous to Europe—such as shipping and (to a lesser extent) guns. Europeans trading to Africa had to make use of Asian and African consumer goods, showing that their system of production was not absolutely superior. It is particularly striking that in the early centuries of trade, Europeans relied heavily on Indian cloths for resale in Africa, and they also purchased cloths on several parts of the West African coast for resale elsewhere. Morocco, Mauritania, Senegambia, Ivory Coast, Benin, Yorubaland, and Loango were all exporters to other parts of Africa—through European middlemen.

African demand for cloth was increasing rapidly in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, so that there was a market for all cloth produced locally as well as room for imports from Europe and Asia. But, directed by an acquisitive capitalist class, European industry increased its capacity to produce on a large scale by harnessing the energy of wind, water, and coal. European cloth industry was able to copy fashionable Indian and African patterns, and eventually to replace them. Partly by establishing a stranglehold on the distribution of cloth around the shores of Africa, and partly by swamping African products by importing cloth in bulk, European traders eventually succeeded in putting an end to the expansion of African cloth manufacture.

When European cloth became dominant on the African market, it meant that African producers were cut off from the increasing demand. The craft producers either abandoned their tasks in the face of cheap available European cloth, or they continued on the same small hand-worked instruments to create styles and pieces for localized markets. Therefore, there was what can be called "technological arrest" or stagnation, and in some instances actual regression, since people forgot even the simple techniques of their forefathers. The

[p.143] abandonment of traditional iron smelting in most parts of Africa is probably the most important instance of technological regression.

Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress. The loss of industry and skill in Africa was extremely small, if we measure it from the viewpoint of modern scientific achievements or even by standards of England in the late eighteenth century. However, it must be borne in mind that to be held back at one stage means that it is impossible to go on to a further stage. When a person was forced to leave school after only two years of primary school education, it is no reflection on him that he is academically and intellectually less developed than someone who had the opportunity to be schooled right through to university level. What Africa experienced in the early centuries of trade was precisely a loss of development opportunity, and this is of the greatest importance.

The European slave trade was a direct block, in removing millions of youth and young adults who are the human agents from whom inventiveness springs. Those who remained in areas badly hit by slave capturing were preoccupied about their freedom rather than with improvements in production. Besides, even the busiest African in West, Central, or East Africa was concerned more with trade than with production, because of the nature of the contacts with Europe; and that situation was not conducive to the introduction of technological advances. The most dynamic groups over a great area of Africa became associated with foreign trade—notably, the Afro-Portuguese middlemen of Upper Guinea, the Akan market women, the Aro traders of Mozambique, and the Swahili and Wanyamwezi of East Africa. The trade which they carried on was in export items like captives and ivory which did not require the invention of machinery. Apart from that, they were agents for distributing European imports.

Apart from inventiveness, we must also consider the borrowing of technology. When a society for whatever reason finds itself technologically trailing behind others, it, catches up not so much by independent inventions but by borrowing. Indeed, very few of man's major scientific discoveries have been separately discovered in different places by different people. Once a principle or a tool is known, it spreads or diffuses to other peoples. Why then did European technology fail to make its way into Africa during the many centuries of contact between the two continents? The basic reason is that the very

[p.144] nature of Afro-European trade was highly unfavorable to the movement of positive ideas and techniques from the European capitalist system to the African pre-capitalist (communal, feudal, and pre-feudal) system of production.

The lines of economic activity attached to foreign trade were either destructive, as slavery was, or at best purely extractive, like ivory hunting and cutting camwood trees. Therefore, there was no reason for wanting to call upon European skills. The African economies would have had little room for such skills unless negative types of exports were completely stopped. A remarkable fact that is seldom brought to light is that several African rulers in different parts of the continent saw the situation clearly, and sought European technology for internal development, which was meant to replace the trade in slaves.

Europeans deliberately ignored those African requests that Europe should place certain skills and techniques at their disposal…. When Agaja Trudo of Dahomey sought to stop the trade in captives, he made an appeal to European craftsmen, and he sent an ambassador to London for that purpose. One European who stayed at the court of Dahomey in the late 1720s told his countrymen that "if any tailor, carpenter, smith or any other sort of white man that is free be willing to come here, he will find very good encouragement." The Asantehene Opoku Ware (1720-50) also asked Europeans to set up factories and distilleries in Asante, but he got no response.

Well into the nineteenth century, Europe displayed the same indifference to requests for practical assistance from Africa, although by that period both African rulers and European capitalists were talking about replacing slave trade. In the early nineteenth century, one king of Calabar (in eastern Nigeria) wrote the British asking for a sugar refinery; while around 1804 King Adandozan of Dahomey was bold enough to ask for a firearms factory! By that date, many parts of West Africa were going to war with European firearms and gunpowder. There grew up a saying in Dahomey that "He who makes the powder wins the war," which was a far-sighted recognition that Africans were bound to fall before the superiority of Europeans in the field of arms technology. Of course, Europeans were also fully aware that their arms technology was decisive, and there was not the slightest chance that they would have agreed to teach Africans to make firearms and ammunition.

The circumstances of African trade with Europe were unfavor-

[p.145] able to creating a consistent African demand for technology relevant to development; and when that demand was raised it was ignored or rejected by the capitalists. After all, it would not have been in the interests of capitalism to develop Africa. . . . Placing the whole question in historical perspective allows us to see that capitalism has always discouraged technological evolution in Africa, and blocks Africa's access to its own technology….

The European slave trade and overseas trade in general had what are known as "multiplier effects" on Europe's development in a very positive sense. This means that the benefits of foreign contacts extended to many areas of European life not directly connected with foreign trade, and the whole society was better equipped for its own internal development. The opposite was true of Africa not only in the crucial sphere of technology but also with regard to the size and purpose of each economy in Africa. Under the normal processes of evolution, an economy grows steadily larger so that after a while two neighboring economies merge into one. That was precisely how national economies were created in the states of Western Europe through the gradual combination of what were once separate provincial economies. Trade with Africa actually helped Europe to weld together more closely the different national economies, but in Africa there was disruption and disintegration at the local level. At the same time, each local economy ceased to be directed exclusively or even primarily towards the satisfaction of the wants of its inhabitants; and (whether or not the particular Africans recognized it) their economic effort served external interests and made them dependent on those external forces based in Western Europe. In this way, the African economy taken as a whole was diverted away from its previous line of development and became distorted. . .

Continuing Politico-Military Developments in Africa-1500 to 1885

Modern African nationalist historians correctly stress that Africa had a meaningful past long before the coming of Europeans. They also stress that Africans made their own history long after coming into

[p.146] contact with Europe, and indeed right up to the period of colonization. That African-centered approach to the continent's past is quite compatible with one which equally emphasizes the transformatory role of external forces, such as overseas trade in slaves, gold, ivory.

[p.147] It is clearly ridiculous to assert that contacts with Europe built or benefited Africa in the pre-colonial period. Nor does it represent reality to suggest (as President Leopold Senghor once did) that the slave trade swept Africa like a bush fire, leaving nothing standing. The truth is that a developing Africa went into slave trading and European commercial relations as into a gale-force wind, which shipwrecked a few societies, set many others off course, and generally slowed down the rate of advance.

Rodney, Walter Rodney. “The Unequal Partnership Between Africans and Europeans.” In The Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Northrup. D. C. Heath, 1994.

David Eltis – “The Economics of African Participation in the Slave Trade”

While Walter Rodney looked at both the demographic and economic impact of the slave trade, David Eltis’s article is primarily focused on only the economic issue. In many ways his article is a response to the points made by Rodney. How does Eltis support or refute the basic arguments of Rodney’s piece? What evidence does he offer to support his points? Do you find his argument more convincing than Rodney’s? Why or why not?

[p.161] Scholars researching the origins and development of the Atlantic economy tend to be more interested in the contribution of precolonial Africa to the Atlantic economy than in the importance of that economy to Africa. The vital role occupied by Africa in the development of the Americas is beyond question, yet that contribution cannot be understood fully without an awareness of the significance of transatlantic trade to Africans. Most scholars with an "Atlantic" orientation would probably argue that transatlantic trade ties affected Africa as profoundly as they affected the Americas, though in obviously different ways…. Recently, both detailed regional studies and continentwide syntheses have returned to an older concern with the effects on Africa of the slave trade, its abolition, and the subsequent rapid increase in transatlantic produce exports.

This more recent concern with external trade is firmly rooted in the quantitative work of the last two decades. Few scholars have failed to take advantage of numerous new estimates of volume and prices in both the slave and commodity trades. But despite this interest, most researchers have not aggregated the different data sources to arrive at estimates for particular African regions (as opposed to countries in Europe and the Americas). More important, they have not given center stage to the implications of these new data for the importance of the overseas economy to Africans.... Except for the issue of the demographic impact of the slave trade on Africa,

[p.162] where ironically the data are weak, recent economic historians have assumed a strong impact from the external sector rather than attempted to assess how great that impact was. The mechanism through which the Atlantic affected Africa has received rather more attention than the strength of that effect. But even here the plausibility of competing hypotheses has tended to rest on qualitative evidence.

A quick review of these hypotheses from an economist's standpoint might go as follows. For the traffic in people, the older literature often depicted slaves as having been stolen from Africa. At the very least, Europeans sold merchandise to Africans for extortionate prices. This can be represented as very unfavorable terms of trade for Africans. A second and more recent view is the opposite of the first. According to it, the influx of trade goods at low prices was so great that domestic production was seriously impaired and an African dependency on foreign producers developed…. The first argument suggests that the slave traders paid too little, whereas the second suggests that they paid too much. The third broad interpretation focuses on the social dislocation that the slave trade caused within Africa. From this standpoint, the slave trade was responsible for spreading the institution of slavery, encouraging social stratification in African societies, and altering relations between African states. For economists, a variant of this view is that the negative externalities (or social costs not covered by slave prices) of selling an African into the Atlantic traffic were considerable. These would include the disruptions of slave raiding and the effects of population decline or slower population growth.

The first two of these broad interpretations, as well as the broader issue of the relative importance of domestic and external sectors within the economies of most West African societies, are, in fact, amenable to quantitative evaluation. New data on prices, volumes, and the composition of trade between Africa and the Atlantic world make possible the reconstitution of decadal "snapshots" of aggregate trading activity from an African perspective over nearly two centuries of the prepartition era. These new aggregations, used in conjunction with backward population projections and inferences about African living standards, permit some new insights on the scale and nature of the impact of the Atlantic world on western Africa.

[p.163] We turn first to the data. It is now possible to estimate the value of total trade between the Atlantic world and western Africa from Senegambia to Angola for five widely separated decades between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. They are the 1680s, the 1730s, the 1780s, the 1820s, and the 1860s. . . For four of these decades, estimates of the regional and compositional distributions are also possible—in the latter case, on the basis of physical volumes as well as values.

The total trade series of [Figure 1], which combines the slave and commodity trades, indicates two cycles of growth in Africa's Atlantic trade. The first, based on the slave trade, and the second, on commodities supplied to an industrializing Europe, were interrupted by a marked decline corresponding to the partial closing of markets for slaves in the Americas. Given the trends in prices of African exports and imports discussed previously, however, there can be little doubt that the volume of total trade increased much more rapidly after 1780 than before, and much more rapidly than the current value

[p.164] totals for the 1780s, 1820s, and 1860s suggest. The volume of goods imported into Africa in the 1820s was certainly no less than it had been in the 1780s. The volume of British exports to Africa increased ten times between 1817-20 and 1846-9, and there was a fivefold increase in the volume of British imports. If the British data are any guide, it follows that trade volumes between Africa and the Atlantic world may well have increased five times between the 1820s and 1860s rather than more than doubling, as suggested by the current value figures. What also follows from the previous discussion is that except for a short reversal during the Napoleonic wars, the terms of trade moved steadily in favor of Africa from the end of the seventeenth century. Probably no other major area trading with Europe in the two centuries before 1870 experienced as continuous and massive a shift. Thus an average slave or a hundredweight of ivory sold on the African coast in the 1860s could command fifteen times the textiles and six or seven times the muskets of their counterparts in the 1680s….

Figure 1. Estimated value of total trade (imports and exports combined) between Africa and the Atlantic world in selected decades, 1680s-1860s, in millions of Pounds sterling

Despite the relative strength of the slave trade, the economy of western Africa remained little affected by trade with the Atlantic in the period covered here—measured at least with the statistics currently available to us….

[p.165] The question of the importance of overseas trade to Africa cannot be addressed without reference to the African domestic economy. There are four ways of approaching this crucial issue in the premodern African context. One is to examine the types of goods imported into and exported from western Africa. Products with a pronounced antisocial impact could have had an effect beyond what the data might at first suggest. The second is to estimate the approximate physical quantities of major products imported on a per capita basis. The third is to compare the levels of per capita trade in Africa with those of Africa's main trading partners. The fourth is to sample the evidence on African domestic product in light of the trade figures discussed previously….

[p.166] On the import side, [Figure 2] presents estimates of the types of goods imported into Africa for four widely separated decades. Although capital goods appear to have been scarce, and although the disruptive impact of firearms, alcohol, and perhaps tobacco needs to be acknowledged, there is actually little in [Figure 2] to separate out Africa from other importers of the pre- and early industrializing

[p.167] worlds. Consumer goods may be divided into those that satisfy the basic requirements of nutrition, clothing, and shelter and those that satisfy psychological needs. In the preindustrial context the latter included sugar, tobacco, and alcohol, along with a host of purely decorative items, some textiles, and most luxury goods. Such "psychic' goods formed no greater share of African imports than of the imports of most other parts of the world. It is likely, in fact, that luxurious textiles and other expensive gifts made up a considerably smaller share of Africa's overseas imports than elsewhere. If the composition of trade magnified the impact of the Atlantic on Africa, it was more likely because of the nature of African exports than imports. The evidence of the composition of trade on the issue of Atlantic impact is thus mixed, with much hinging on the contentious questions of what proportion of the captives were the product of war and the demographic implications of the trade.

Figure 2. Estimated relative value of imports into western Africa in selected decades, 1680s-1860s

The physical quantities of four products imported into sub-Saharan Africa over the two centuries preceding partition may be inferred from the customs data used earlier. These, combined with Manning's population estimates, yield crude per capita import figures that form the second of the four approaches to assessing the domestic importance of overseas trade. The four products are textiles, gun, alcohol, and tobacco, which together accounted for well over half of all imports. We begin with textiles. During each year of the 1860s the British and French exported on average about 45 million yards of cotton textiles to Africa. A rough allowance for exports by other nations, and a further adjustment for textiles other than cottons—a very small category at this time—suggests that about 57 million yards of imported textiles of all kinds were traded annually in the decade 1861-70. Using [Manning’s] population estimate, this amounts to nearly three yards per person; and as a two-yard "wrapper" is sufficient to clothe one person, it would seem that overseas imports supplied up to half (depending on one's estimates of per capita consumption) of the region's textile consumption. The point to note, however, is that per capita textile imports were far below what they were shortly to become. In Dahomey between 1890 and 1914, imported cloth provided no less than fifteen yards per person each year, and there was still a vibrant domestic industry in existence, exporting some of its output to Brazil.

It might be concluded that imported cloths reached a wider African market in the eighteenth century but began to impinge on

[p.168] the domestic textile industry only as the slave trade was replaced by the traffic in commodities in the mid-nineteenth century….

The population estimates permit a new perspective on gun imports. Per capita gun imports were likely greater in the 1860s than in any of the major slave-exporting decades. Combined values of African imports of guns and gunpowder are estimated here at £0.008 per person for each year in the 1780s, or one gun per 118 persons; £0.009 in the 1820s, or one gun per 145 persons; and £0.016 in the 1860s, or one gun per 103 persons…. One further relative perspective might be considered. Census data for the United States make possible a transatlantic comparison of guns and gunpowder. In 1820 a lower bound estimate of the value of these items produced in the United States implies a ratio of £0.013, larger than the African ratio for the 1820s though somewhat below the 1860 figure. By 1860 in the United States, however, Americans were producing £0.037 arms per person, more than double the contemporary African import ratio. As net exports of guns and gunpowder from the United States were very small before the Civil War, and domestic production of armaments in Africa was negligible at this time, we can conclude that more guns and gunpowder were used in the United States, and probably by other societies in the Americas, than in that part of Africa affected by the slave trade. Similar comparisons are not possible for the eighteenth century, but the 1780s African ratio of £0.008 worth of guns and gunpowder per person in Africa was lower than any of the previously given nineteenth-century ratios. The discussion suggests that those claiming a major impact from arms have to build their arguments on some basis other than just the volume of imports. The supply of arms obviously facilitated slave raids, and guns may have been concentrated geographically, so that local effects may have been considerable. If this was the case, then it is also clear that over large geographic areas their impact must have been small.

The other two imported products examined here were less important. Tobacco, in semiprocessed form, averaged 12.8 million pounds per year in the 1860s, or about half a pound per person—not a large amount by modern standards. It was, nevertheless, more than double the per capita consumption of the 1820s or the 1780s,

[p.169] though exact comparisons are complicated by the switch from roll to leaf tobacco. Alcoholic beverages averaged 0.75 million gallons in the 1780s, 1.0 million gallons in the 1820s, and 6.1 million gallons in the 1860s, again on a per year basis. The annual per capita consumption is calculated at 0.033, 0.05, and 0.3 gallon for the 1780s, 1820s, and 1860s, respectively. For the 1680s, consumption of both products by Africans must have been infinitesimally small. Again, perspective is provided by consumption ratios for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this period, Dahomey was importing four or five times the amount of both tobacco and alcohol per person that western Africa had imported in the 1860s. The scale of precolonial imports of these products signals something less than a revolution in consumer behavior—even in the 1860s. Just as clearly, however, rapid growth did occur in the mid-nineteenth century. These figures suggest that merchandise distributed from the Atlantic was of small importance relative to what it was shortly to become. Furthermore, if elite groups took a disproportionate share of these goods, many, perhaps most, living within reach of the Atlantic would have had little experience of imports….

There remains the possibility that the income generated by overseas commerce was concentrated either geographically or among classes in such a way as to guarantee it an impact beyond what the aggregate figures here would suggest as likely. There is also the very real possibility that the social costs of the slave trade were of a different order of magnitude to the essentially private returns estimated here. These are issues largely beyond the scope of the present chapter. It is, however, possible to make a tentative distribution of trade from the 1730s to the 1860s.

With the exception of west-central Africa in the 1730s, no region ever accounted for as much as one-third of total western African Atlantic trade—and west-central Africa, it might be noted, is easily the biggest in terms of coastline, hinterland and perhaps, too, population, of all the regions represented. . . . The Bight of Benin and the Gold Coast, regions with a high profile in the historiography, were not the highest revenue earners, and . . . only two areas—the Bight of Biafra and Senegambia—weathered suppression of the slave trade without a drop in trade revenues. The Bight of Biafra had consistently the greatest trade contact with the Atlantic—probably from the 1740s. This was also the region with the highest population density. .. . Per capita calculations of regional trade might be stretching the data too far. But the order of magnitude of the figures . . . suggests that in no region could the revenue per person of ocean-going trade have been significant. To put the same point differently, African populations would have had to have been extremely small for Atlantic trade to have been important—so small, in fact, that transatlantic traffic on the scale and duration of the latest estimates of the slave trade would have been impossible….

[p.171] Revenues within a region may have been severely skewed in favor of one or more states. It is highly likely that two-thirds or more of all slaves entering the Atlantic traffic left from no more than a dozen ports. The "coasting" trade was mainly an Upper Guinea phenomenon, induced probably by the lack of a major river between the Senegal and the Volta. Communities within or adjacent to the estuaries of the Senegal, Niger, and Zaire rivers, as well as those located at strategic points on the lagoon systems of the Slave and Loango coasts, obviously depended heavily on trade with the Atlantic. The pleading for the return of the slave trade in the early nineteenth century on the part of the Loango Mafouks was a result of this dependence. The greatest geographic concentration of trade within any region during the precolonial decades surveyed here was probably in the nineteenth-century Niger Delta communities…. But these were essentially trading rather than producing states, and the further away from these points the analysis is carried, the more dispersed would be the impact of the Atlantic.

[p.172] We can now return to the broad historiographical themes discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Clearly, the slave trade engulfed Africa's Atlantic commerce in the eighteenth century and in much of the nineteenth too. But it is equally clear that any plausible numerical assessment indicates a similarly massive dominance of the domestic sector over the external within most African societies. This assessment obviously ignores the social costs of the external slave trade, but to this we will return. At the very least, the ratio of overseas trade to domestic economic activity was far lower for the majority of Africans than for the typical inhabitant of Europe or the Americas.

As for the three possible mechanisms in the historiography through which Atlantic trade might have manifested itself in Africa, severely unfavorable terms of trade, creation of a dependency, or heavy negative externalities, only the third is not called into question by the data assembled here. The first, positing strongly negative terms of trade for Africa, is highly unlikely. As the Royal African Company's records testify, significant volumes of merchandise were exchanged for slaves in the 1680s, and for most of the nearly two succeeding centuries the terms of trade shifted in favor of Africa. The second, positing a volume of merchandise imports high enough to create an African dependency on overseas producers, seems equally unlikely. The value of Atlantic trade relative to possible African income and population levels, and relative, too, to what it was to become in the early twentieth century, makes a dependency effect before 1870 improbable. We are left with the negative externalities or socially dislocative effects of the slave trade. The data developed here shed little light on this approach, except to imply that the disruption did not undermine the predominance of domestic economic activity. It would seem, nevertheless, to be the most promising route to evaluating the effect of the slave trade on Africa.

Some might see the later part of this analysis as tending to minimize the significance of the transatlantic slave trade, at least as far

[p.173] as Africa is concerned. This would be unfortunate. It is highly likely that what the British extracted from their North American mainland colonies represented a tiny fraction of North American income, and that the drain from India to Britain in the late eighteenth century was an insignificant share of Indian domestic product. But these facts in no way reduced the significance of British imperialism to contemporaries, nor will it reduce it for modern historians of the United States and India. The same point may be made about the present analysis of the forced removal of Africans from Africa. The intention here is merely to focus the search for the effects of the slave trade on Africa and to nudge scholars into giving more attention to trends within Africa in understanding precolonial African history. Like the peoples of the Americas, and more than most populations in the nineteenth-century world, Africans were feeding, clothing, and sheltering themselves, as well as developing the full panoply of a multifaceted cultural existence, without overseas economic exchange….

Except for some coastal regions, it is hard to believe that any significant domestic industry was threatened by overseas imports until well past [the mid-nineteenth century]. Nor, with the exception of new food crops and possibly firearms—easily the largest precolonial capital good imports—is it easy to see a large impact from any imported technology. West Africans had iron, sophisticated textiles, a range of indigenous metalwares, and, outside the tsetse zone, draught animals. Despite a prolonged shift in the terms of trade in favor of Africa, European products could not penetrate the African market until the second half of the nineteenth century. The same products made greater inroads into other parts of the Atlantic world at much earlier, dates. George Brooks has commented that Africans were remarkably self-sufficient in 1800 after three centuries of Atlantic trade. The same may be said of 1870.

Eltis, David. “The Economics of African Participation in the Slave Trade.” In The Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Northrup. D. C. Heath, 1994.

HI 333 History & Politics of Africa Topic 2D Sources – The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade 16