Context – African underdevelopment, demographic and diaspora
Initially, studies of the Atlantic slave trade were driven by responses to the cruelty and
horrors of slavery. Philip Curtin and Paul Lovejoy were among the first to attempt to use new
quantitative methods to analyse the slave trade, attempting to historicise the institution of
slavery and the slave trade by estimating both the volume of the trade profits and the
number of people enslaved and transported from West Africa. Between 1500 and 1900,
Lovejoy estimated that 11,656,000 slaves crossed the Atlantic.1 To put this figure in context,
historians have estimated that the volume of the African, Middle Eastern and Indian Ocean
slave trade over a much longer time period (between 650 and 1900) was slightly lower than
this. Scholars then attempted to estimate how this loss of population might have affected
West African development. From Philip Curtin’s first study in 1969, however, these numbers
and their significance have been intensely debated. The geographic breadth of the Atlantic
world and problems with the availability and quality of records make precise calculations
difficult. Historians have also been concerned that this shift toward quantitative and
demographic analysis has moved the debate toward defending particular figures or models,
and distracted us from understanding the social changes that the slave trade provoked in
West Africa and across the Atlantic world. Sylviane Diouf, in her edited volume on African
resistance and responses to the slave trade,2 argued that because the records of the
traders, bankers, and insurance companies offer the most complete statistical sources for
these studies, they risk reinforcing a view of slaves as ‘cargo’ rather than human beings
violently torn from their communities, and West Africans as individuals actively engaged in
opposing or perpetuating the trade.
Walter Rodney, a Guyanese historian and politician, put forward the ‘underdevelopment’
thesis in his 1972 book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He argued that African
economic development was halted by the slave trade, and that Europeans had used profits
from exploitative trades with Africa to finance industrialization at home, while
underdeveloping Africa. Historians such as J.D. Fage and David Eltis, however, have
challenged Rodney’s ‘transformation’ thesis on several fronts. They argued that by
considering the slave trade over such a long period of time, Rodney exaggerated the impact
of European incursions and the slave trade on West African society. Northrup further argued
that, in the interests of seeing the Atlantic trade as the motive force in present-day debates
about African development, Rodney ignored the extent to which African polities continued to
develop along long-standing local patterns, and through local agency, and also the extent to
which European colonization in the period following abolition may have disrupted West
African socio-economic life more drastically than the slave trade.
While the precise extent of the demographic impact of the slave trade on West Africa has
been fiercely debated, few dispute that the trade had enormous repercussions for West
African society. While in Western Europe wealth and status were tied to ownership of land,
in West African society wealth and status were measured by the ability to control and recruit
labour (See ‘theories of slavery’ in Module 1). Since the fifteenth century, West African
history had been shaped by a drive toward creating stable agrarian settlements, requiring
building up self-sustaining populations, clearing forested regions and establishing new
polities around farming and trade. A major factor in this process was recruitment and control
of labour. John Thornton wrote that “If Africans did not have private ownership of one factor
1
Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983. pp. 25, 44, 137
2
Sylviane A. Diouf, Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, Western African Studies.
Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press; James Currey, 2003.
of production (land), they could still own another, labor.”3 The ownership and control of
slaves or the ability to recruit and maintain other dependents, Thornton argues, became a
marker of leadership in a society in which land was held communally. Those who controlled
labour became important within that society, and their slaves could assist in the
administration of government as well. They were “used by state officials as a dependent and
loyal group, both for the production of revenue and for performing military service in the
struggles between kings or executives … and other elite parties who sought to control royal
absolutism.”4 Slavery in the West African context must also been viewed as a part of the
criminal justice system, where enslavement was a punishment for serious crimes, and
warfare, as rival kingdoms engaged in border disputes and prisoners of war were taken by
victors as slave labour. As the Atlantic slave trade became economically important for West
African kingdoms, and European traders gained power and influence along the Gold Coast
and Niger delta region, people were captured solely for the purpose of being sold. Manning
notes that the preference for male slaves in the Americas led to a gender imbalance in the
Atlantic trade, as two-thirds of those taken were male, and thus a gender imbalance in some
regions of West Africa, reflected in an increase in polygyny (marriage to multiple wives).
There was a preference for male slaves on the plantations because it was believed that they
would make better labourers. It was economically more advantageous to purchase additional
slaves rather than to create self-sustaining slave populations in the New World, meaning that
the life expectancy of most slaves arriving at New World plantations during the eighteenth
century was horrifically short. This would change with the abolition of the trade in 1807,
when the British abolition of the slave trade drove made it more difficult for plantation owners
to purchase new slaves, and the demand for female slaves therefore rose.5
Historians also began to pay more attention to the African diaspora spreading across the
globe -- by the sixteenth century, for example, according to Tom Earle and Kate J.P. Lowe,
Africans made up 10% of the population of Lisbon (Earle & Lowe, 2005). One relatively
recent innovation has been to place the slave trade within the context of the Atlantic world.
Earlier studies tended to focus on slavery and the slave trade at fixed points, in isolation; for
example, studies focussing in on American or Caribbean plantation economies, on slave
trading merchants in major ports in Britain, America or Europe, on West African slave
markets, or experiences of slaves on the harrowing ‘middle passage’, making the journey in
slave ships from West Africa to the Americas. The concept of the ‘Atlantic world’ combined
all of these disparate ‘sites’ in which the slave trade took place. It allowed scholars to think
more broadly both about the lived experiences and agency of the slaves themselves within
this context, and to think about the ways in which the trade itself linked all of these places
into a new ‘system’ or network along which ideas as well as commodities and people could
travel. The idea of the Atlantic as a ‘networked’ system reminds us that goods, people and
ideas never just travelled one way.
One individual example can help to underscore this point: Olaudah Equiano, born in 1745 in
present-day Nigeria, and sold to English slave traders at the age of eleven, cannot easily be
characterized as ‘West African’, ‘American’, or ‘British’. He was, rather, ‘Atlantic’: Ira Berlin’s
category of ‘Atlantic creole’ seems designed for Equiano. Purchased by an officer in the
Royal Navy after only a few weeks on a colonial North American plantation in Virginia,
Equiano fought in the Seven Years’ War before his owner, Michael Henry Pascal, sold him
to a West Indies planter. Buying his freedom in 1766, Equiano then himself purchased and
3
John K. Thornton. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. 2nd ed.
Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 85.
4
Ibid, p. 89.
5
See Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1832. Kingston: Heinemann
(Caribbean); London: Currey, 1990.
oversaw slaves on a Central American plantation, and travelled around the Caribbean, to
North America, to the Mediterranean, and even to the North Pole. He converted to
Methodism in 1774, after a brush with death during his Arctic journey provoked a spiritual
crisis. (Christianity played an important role in the history of Atlantic slavery, as a source of
ideologies that sometimes challenged and sometimes reinforced or legitimised the slave
system, and by the eighteenth century, some Protestant sects provided a social and political
network for abolitionists.) Equiano married an Englishwoman in 1792, leaving behind two
daughters and a wealthy estate by his death in 1797. By the late 1770s he had become
prominent in the abolition movement, writing editorials for newspapers and ultimately his
autobiography, (see primary sources document exercise below for more on this) now
considered both a literary masterpiece and an important first-hand account of Atlantic
slavery.6
Equiano’s life history highlights another important trend in the historiography which has
focused upon the agency of slaves themselves, and on forms of resistance to the slave trade
both within West African societies and among enslaved populations in the Americas.
Sylviane Diouf, in her work on resistance to the slave trade in West Africa, chronicles the
legal and economic struggles of individual families to buy the freedom of enslaved relatives
sent to labour on plantations in the U.S. and Caribbean, a practice known as ‘captive
redemption’. One example Diouf uses is the story of Ibrahima abd al-Rahman Barry, who
spent 40 years as a slave in Mississippi, but then returned to Liberia in 1829 to collect
money from his wealthy family to purchase his five children and eight grandchildren from
their owners. Unfortunately, Ibrahima died before a caravan from his relatives arrived in
Monrovia carrying $6,000 to $7,000 in gold (Diouf, 2003, p. 81). Historians such as Diouf
have argued that in African accounts of the slave trade, there is no sense of having been
‘betrayed’ by other Africans. She argues, as do many others, that the slave trade defined a
sense of an ‘African race’ for white Europeans, but that this racial identity, as well as a sense
of ‘Africa’ as a geographic unity, did not exist in Africa before the later nineteenth century,
when colonialism began to enable the spread of European racial ideas.
Finally, even though one might think that the ‘world history’ of an institution such as slavery
would lend itself to a ‘macro-history’ approach, i.e. studies of large-scale trade networks,
policies and global intellectual and popular debates, some important studies of the history of
the Atlantic slave trade have returned our attention to everyday experience and
consumption. The slave trade fulfilled a broad demand for new consumer items like fine
cotton fabrics, tea, coffee, sugar, refined wheat and rice products, and even affordable
‘china’ dishware to hold these new everyday luxuries. Some of these products went on, as
Jan van de Vries has argued, to define new aspects of domestic life (which C.A. Bayly refers
to in Birth of the Modern World as the ‘invention of breakfast’7). By looking at instances of
resistance, individual as well as group histories, and intimate narratives of production and
consumption, historians have been able to illuminate the ways in which slavery caused
fundamental changes in everyday lives.
6
Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens, Ga.: University of
Georgia Press; [London: Eurospan, distributor], 2005.
7
C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons.
Blackwell History of the World. Malden, MA ; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, p. 1