The Economic, Political, and Social Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa

Abstract

The Transatlantic slave trade radically impaired Africa's potential to develop economically and maintain its social and political stability. The arrival of Europeans on the West African Coast and their establishment of slave ports in various parts of the continent triggered a continuous process of exploitation of Africa's human resources, labor, and commodities. This exploitative commerce influenced the African political and religious aristocracies, the warrior classes and the biracial elite, who made small gains from the slave trade, to participate in the oppression of their own people. The Europeans, on the other hand, greatly benefited from the Atlantic trade, since it allowed them to amass the raw materials that fed the Industrial Revolution to the detriment of African societies whose capacity to transform their modes of production into a viable entrepreneurial economy was severely halted.

Notes

NOTES

1. Samir Amin, “Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa: Origins and Contemporary Forms,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 10.4 (December 1972): 505.

2. Ivan Van Sertima, “Black History: African Civilization is a Shattered Diamond,” USA Today, 23 February 1989, 09A.

3. Johannes Postma, The Atlantic Slave Trade: Greenwood Guides to Historic Events, 1500–1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 5.

4. Stephen Behrendt, “The Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Microsoft® Encarta® Africana CD ROM (Microsoft Corporation, 1999).

5. For a discussion of the differences between European and African concepts of slavery, see Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality,” in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 3–81; and Wyatt MacGaffey, “Economic and Social Dimensions of Kongo Slavery,” in Slavery in Africa, ed. Miers and Kopytoff, 235–57.

6. For a discussion of instances of flexibility within Arab forms of slavery, see J. O. Hunwick, “African Slaves in the Mediterranean World: A Neglected Aspect of the African Diaspora,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (Washington, DC: Harvard University Press, 1993), 289–323; Pekka Masonen, “Trans-Saharan Trade and the West African Discovery of the Mediterranean,” in Ethnic Encounter and Culture Change, ed. M’hammed Sabour and Knut S. Vikør (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1997), 116–42.

7. Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade: Pre-colonial History, 1450–1850 (Boston: Brown and Company, 1961), 39.

8. Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 309. See also J. Suret-Canale, “La Sénégambie a l’ère de la traite,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 11.1 (1977): 126.

9. Joseph E. Inikori, “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Ansey,” Journal of African History 17.2 (1976): 205–6.

10. Eric Eustace Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; New York: Capricorn Books, 1966), 124.

11. In addition to these figures, Herbert Klein argues that between 1680 and 1760, the price of a slave in Africa increased from 1,000 shells to 8,000 shells. See Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 110, 113, 114.

12. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 32–33.

13. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (1999).

14. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 268.

15. Postma, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 35.

16. Inikori, “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade,” 197–223; Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley Engerman, “Introduction: Gainers and Loosers,” in The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, ed. Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley Engerman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 5–6; Postma, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 35–36; Mohamed Mbodj and Charles Becker, “A Propos de l’histoire et des populations de l’Afrique Noire: Propositions Pour de Nouvelles Approches,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 23.1 (1989): 42–43.

17. Inikori and Engerman, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 6.

18. David Henige criticizes both Diop and Inikori for their estimates: “Conversely, taking advantage of the opportunity to base himself on actual evidence, [Joseph] Miller argues that, for West Central Africa at least, drought, famine, and disease were, in aggregate, more effective constraints on population growth than the slave trade. It does appear that from the sixteenth century West Africa became more humid, which should have (and maybe did) reduce the probability of frequent and severe droughts and famines. But any such blessing was not likely to have been unmixed since higher levels of humidity frequently bring with them a higher incidence of such diseases as malaria and plague.” See David Henige, “Measuring the Immeasurable: The Atlantic Slave Trade, West African Population and the Pyrrhonian Critic,” The Journal of African History 27.2 (1986): 307–8.

19. Louise Marie Diop-Maes, Afrique noire démographie, sol et histoire (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1996), 290–99, my translation.

20. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), 13.

21. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 47, 45.

22. Joseph E. Inikori, “Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in Volume I: African History before 1885, ed. Toyin Falola (Durham, NC: North Carolina Academic Press, 2000), 393–94.

23. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 105–6.

24. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 58, 59.

25. Inikori and Engerman, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2.

26. Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 220.

27. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 7.

28. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 107.

29. Donald R. Wright, African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1990), 36–37.

30. Inikori and Engerman, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 39.

31. Davidson, The African Slave Trade, 278.

32. James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 35.

33. Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 436.

34. Martin A. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68–69.

35. Mary Tolford Wilson, “Peaceful Integration: The Owner's Adoption of His Slaves’ Food,” The Journal of Negro History 49.2 (April 1964): 121–22.

36. George E. Brooks, “Peanuts and Colonialism: Consequences of the Commercialization of Peanuts in West Africa, 1830-70,” The Journal of African History 16.1 (1975): 30, 32.

37. Abdoulaye Bathily, “La Traite Atlantique des Esclaves et ses Effets Economiques et Sociaux en Afrique: La Cas du Galam, Royaume de l’Hinterland Sénégambien au Dix-huitième Siècle,” Special Issue in Honour of J. D. Fage, The Journal of African History 27.2 (1986): 285.

38. Charles Becker, “Conditions écologiques, crises de subsistance et histoire de la population à l’époque de la traite des esclaves en Sénégambie (17 e–18 e siècle),” Canadian Journal of African Studies 20.3 (1986): 359–60, 368.

39. Brooks, “Peanuts and Colonialism,” 29.

40. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule, 68–69.

41. James F. Searing, “Aristocrats, Slaves, and Peasants: Power and Dependency in the Wolof States, 1700–1850,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 21.3 (1988): 475.

42. Searing, West African Slavery, 35.

43. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa, 115–16.

44. Inikori and Engerman, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 3, 4.

45. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 108–9, 66–67.

46. Ibid., 67.

47. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa, 310.

48. Oliver Ransford, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Transatlantic Slavery (London: Fakenham and Reading, 1971), 73, 74.

49. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 127.

50. Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 72.

51. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, ed. Robert J. Allison (New York: Bedford Press, 1995), 47.

52. Joseph Inikori, “Africa in World History: The Export Slave Trade from Africa and the Emergence of the Atlantic Economic Order,” in General History of Africa. V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, ed. B. A. Ogot (California: Heinemann, 1992), 40.

53. Joseph C. Miller, “Review of West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860, by James Searing,” The American Historical Review 100.1 (February 1995): 1.

54. Inikori, “Africa in World History,” 104.

55. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, “Women's Importance in African Slave Systems,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997), 15–16.

56. John Thornton, “Sexual Demography: The Impact of the Slave Trade on Family Structure,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, ed. Robertson and Klein, 44.

57. Ibid., 39–40.