African Labor History

Abstract

For centuries, African workers have contributed fundamentally to the growth of the West's economy, yet the cost to the African continent has too often been conflict and immiseration. Between the midfifteenth and midnineteenth centuries, approximately twelve million slaves were exported across the Atlantic. Their labors transformed the American landscape and their productivity fueled the expansion of European capitalism. But for the slave-exporting regions of Africa that is, all of the continent with the exception of the northernmost and south ernmost parts the combined loss of people through emigration, slavery-related mortality, and generally high death rates relative to the rest of the world meant that by 1850 tropical Africa had, according to one historian, a population little more than half what it would have been in the absence of slavery and the slave trade.1 Paradoxically, the end of the Atlantic slave trade in the first half of the nineteenth century led not to freedom but to new forms of labor exploitation to produce goods for the West. Immediately following the end of the slave trade, African slave-exporting regions, their economies long geared to the production of a commodity for an outside market, put their now devalued slaves to work within the continent to meet the newly industrializing West's insatia ble demand for vegetable oils and other lubricants.2 Although the European conquerors of Africa at the end of the nineteenth century campaigned against domestic slavery and finally brought the practice to an end through a long, fitful, and uneven process, they substituted new forms of labor control in efforts to direct African production toward goods for European consumption rather than local food needs.3 By the twentieth century the combined impact of such experiences, as another historian has argued, was the transformation of poverty from an