The Atlantic Slave Trade

Abstract

This book is a synthesis intended to communicate to scholars and the educated public Herbert Klein’s understanding of the past quarter century of scholarly research on the Atlantic slave trade and African slavery in the Americas. The need for the synthesis, as Klein explains, arises from “the gap between popular understanding and scholarly knowledge,” as racial conflict in North America has made it difficult to treat the subject “in a rational manner” (p. xvii). Klein hopes to overcome this sociology of knowledge and offer a “rational” synthesis of current research to scholars and the general public. Clearly, this is not a mean task for a scholar working in a North American university and socializing in North American society and intellectual culture.The coverage of issues is more or less comprehensive. In the context of global history, the issue raised is why Western Europe expanded overseas and Asia (China or India) did not. The explanation is Europe’s “unique” ability to mobilize capital and labor, largely because of strong state institutions and a rising merchant class with access to government support (p. 53). Somewhat related to the debate provoked by Henry Louis Gate Jr.’s “Wonders of Africa,” the question of ultimate responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade is addressed: It was “created” by Europeans and “brought to an end by European intervention” (p. 73). What scholars now refer to as the Eric Williams multitheses are all examined in the light of current scholarship. In view of the beating Williams received from Western scholars in the 1960s and 1970s, the surprise is how close Klein is to Williams’s position. Apart from the profits thesis considered extreme, he finds support in current scholarship for the “enormous wealth” created in the Americas by Africans and the stimulus this gave to industrialization in Western Europe. On the question of why New World demand for slave labor focused exclusively on Africa, there is clear agreement with Williams—the reason was economics, not racism: “In the context of late-fifteenth-century Africa and Europe, it was Africans who could be purchased and transported at a cost that was within the capacity of the American colonizing powers to pay and still make a profit out of their colonies” (p. 16). However, conditions in Africa, which explain the cheap supply, are not demonstrated. Even on the highly controversial issue of abolition, Klein comes quite close to Williams. “While the arguments against the slave trade may have had a moral origin,” he says, “they were also based on the interests of European workers and capitalists and not on any concern with the African slaves themselves” (p. 185). On these and several other issues there is a fair balance and “rational” synthesis of current scholarship. One omission that should be mentioned at this point is the role of the slaves themselves in ending American slavery, a major theme in current scholarship.When it comes to the more strictly African side of the subject, presentation of current scholarly knowledge is problematic. To be fair, Klein makes no secret of his limitations in African history. To start, the criticism of writers who deny the existence of slave markets in Africa, “assuming that all slaves were taken by piratical seizure of European traders” (p. 103), would be seen as shadow boxing by African historians. What they would find even more baffling is the impression of a “discovery” that the captives transported from Africa were, in the main, sold to the Europeans by traders in Africa. Since the 1950s African historians, black and white —John Fage, Kenneth Dike, Jan Vansina, Walter Rodney, K. Y. Daaku, Basil Davidson, A. G. Hopkins, I. A. Akinjogbin, Robin Law, Ralph Austen, and Joseph Inikori—have said repeatedly and unambiguously that African middlemen sold captives to European traders. The popular and scholarly literature in African history has no debate on the existence of a slave market in Africa. What has been debated is the timing and the circumstances of its development. Further, it is argued that European explorations in the Atlantic brought together societies at unequal levels of commercial and political development. European traders, backed by their governments, exploited their superiority in these matters to impose European economic needs (through trade and military power) on African and other societies in the Atlantic basin. Hence, the shift from the early European trade in African products to the trade in African captives, and the ending of the trade in captives and return to trade in products, were all caused by Europeans. It is not hard to rationally understand that, given the prevailing political and market conditions, there were individuals in Africa who, in their own self-interest, responded to the changing demands of the European traders. African societies would have to be different from all other human societies known to historians for that not to have happened. What is not scholarly “rational” is to turn the response into cause and stand history on its head. These are issues that the book does not do enough to help the reader understand.In general, the analysis of the trade’s impact on Africa’s long-term development process is problematic on several counts. The comparison of forced migration from Africa with nineteenth-century migration from Europe to the Americas takes no account of the differing long-term development needs of the two regions, and their radically different population densities, during the periods in question. Average population densities in Western Europe increased from roughly 68 per square mile in 1200 to 81 in 1300. Patrick Manning’s population figures employed by Klein imply average densities of less than 15 per square mile for sub-Saharan Africa during the Atlantic slave trade era. This, together with the differing levels of integration into the international trade of the medieval and early modern world, largely explains the greater degree of commercial and political development in Western Europe relative to Western Africa on the eve of the Atlantic slave trade. Thus, over the four centuries of that trade Africa needed population growth and international trade in products to stimulate the development of its market institutions—including markets for land and free labor—and create the necessary conditions for modern economic development. On the other hand, by the mid-nineteenth century the economies of Western Europe had moved far beyond those needs. Rapidly industrializing Western Europe had generated large landless and proletarianized populations pressing hard on resources. Migration to the Americas thus acted as a positive mechanism to relieve this pressure. For example, England’s population in 1851 was 16.7 million (compare with 25 million for all of West Africa at the time), a density of approximately 332 per square mile. This is the context, provided by current scholarship, for rationally understanding the adverse effects of the Atlantic slave trade on the long-term development process in Africa which the book does not do enough to make accessible to the reader. Klein’s argument that the slave trade was a small fraction of the internal market in Western Africa is con trary to the evidence, even the evidence he presented. If European imports at the height of the slave trade were 5 percent of West Africa’s GNP (90 percent of the imports paying for slaves), as he says (p. 125), then import and export activities associated with the slave trade would be about 10 percent of West Africa’s GNP. Given what we know of the proportionate extent of the market sectors of the more commercialized economies of seventeenth-century China and late medieval England, and all the direct and indirect evidence for Western Africa, it is unlikely that the market sector was more than 15 percent of the latter’s GNP during the slave trade era. The Atlantic slave trade was thus a dominant factor in the market sector. Considering the enclave character of slave trading—cutting off the much greater part of the region, from which captives were violently “stolen” without market exchange—it is rationally understandable why it distorted and retarded market development in Western Africa as a whole.Klein’s exaggeration of the extent of Western Africa’s internal market partly explains his unrealistic argument concerning the determinants of sex ratios in the Atlantic slave trade. It should be stressed that the argument is fatally flawed by logical inconsistencies. The reader is told African slaveholders’ preference for female slaves reduced their supply to the Atlantic export market, making the population transported to the Americas predominantly male. If this was true, it should show up in the relative coastal prices of male and female slaves sold for Atlantic export— female slaves being the relatively scarce group should receive higher prices. On the contrary, the extensive coastal price data show male prices consistently higher, a differential often as large as 25 percent. The reader is also told exporters serving the Middle East markets demanded and exported predominantly female slaves, which is said to also contribute to reduced supply of female slaves to the European traders. But why the sex ratio of exports to the Middle East was not determined by the preference of the Western African domestic market for female slaves, the same way Klein says the sex ratio of Atlantic exports was determined, is not explained. What the evidence from current scholarship shows is that the bidding power of the European traders for male and female slaves was much greater than that of the domestic market. Hence, the character of the servile populations and the class of people who held them on the Atlantic coast and the hinterland were very much connected to the Atlantic slave trade itself. Those populations actually remained constricted until the cutting off of American demand brought the prices tumbling down, at the same time that commodity production for export expanded, in the late nineteenth century. Klein’s point, that “slave women were cheaper to acquire than free local women in polygynous societies” (p. 165), is at variance with the facts. In the late eighteenth century, coastal export prices for women slaves were generally at about £20 sterling. Given the per capita income of the time, had the dowry for free local women been as high as £20, and paid in goods comparable in quality and assortment to those employed by the European traders, only a tiny fraction of the male population in Africa would have been able to afford a wife.The discussion of the impact of imported manufactures also poses difficulties. We know that the same Oriental textiles sold in Western Africa by the Europeans took away domestic demand from British manufacturers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries before their importation was restricted by government under pressure from local producers. If these textiles had no adverse effects on the development of Western Africa’s textile industry, then Western African producers must have been more efficient than their British counterparts, something the evidence fails to bear out. In fact, we do know that the imported textiles drove out from the Gold Coast cotton textiles previously imported from the Benin Kingdom in Nigeria. That some textile production in Western Africa continued is no evidence that the development of the textile industry in coastal West Africa and the hinterland was not adversely affected.Other difficulties worth mentioning include the volume of slave exports. Here figures are paraded with unwarranted certainty without telling the reader the quality of evidence upon which they are based. And when the authority of “most scholars” is invoked it is not clear whether “most” refers to just a group of friends or it includes all scholars from Africa, the Caribbean, and the rest of the world. Also unclear are the cost calculations behind the claim that goods exported to Western Africa constituted 55–65 percent of the total cost of a slaving venture (p. 86) and that shipping cost was “minor” (p. 97). The extensive private records in the British trade show consistently that cargo cost was less than one-third of all costs— England-Africa-America-England—in wartime and less than one-half in peacetime, the main costs being shipping and insurance. Again, the claim that “judicial activity” was the primary mechanism employed by the Aro of southeastern Nigeria to generate export slaves (p. 120) is contrary to the evidence of Kenneth Dike and Felicia Ekejiuba, the main authorities on the Aro. The timing and the circumstances under which various African regions were drawn into the trade are often inaccurately presented. So too are the complexities of the causal relationship between the slave trade and wars in Africa. Furthermore, there is no empirical basis for the assertion that the Yoruba “derived significant wealth” from the Atlantic slave trade (p. 63). The conditions created by the trade offered no market incentives for the investment of trade profits to create productive assets (wealth). The trade allowed a few individuals to increase consumption of imported luxuries without productive investment, which had to wait until the era of products trade in palm produce, cocoa, and peanuts. Finally, a minor correction: the controversial Jaga invasion of the Kongo was in 1568, not 1658 (p. 65).Despite the difficulties noted, the book does serve a useful purpose. Experienced scholars need to devote some time to bridging the gap between professional history and popular knowledge. Read along with texts presenting alternative positions, it can be used in college courses at all levels.