African slavery and other forms of social oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the context of the Atlantic slave trade

Abstract

In the literature on the Atlantic slave trade from Africa one often encounters the view that by the time European slave traders arrived on the west coast of Africa, African rulers already had in their possession large stocks of slaves. This chapter tests the hypothesis against empirical evidence relating to the Upper Guinea Coast of West Africa. It explains, the growth of slavery in the region was directly linked to the growth of the export slave trade. One of the most direct connections between the Atlantic slave trade and the nineteenth-century pattern of social stratification and oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast lay in the fact that numbers of Africans were captured with a view to being sold to the European slavers, but they remained for greater or lesser periods in the service of their African captors.