The Slave Trade with Africa

The slave trade of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries is known, in popular imagination, primarily for those parts of it in which Europeans or people of European descent participated directly. We can draw on vivid images of slave ships making the Middle Passage, or of slaves being sold on the block or working in the fields in the New World. But, though the kidnapping of Kunte Kinte figured in Roots, the African end of the slave trade is far less familiar.

Yet the slave trade was the principal export trade of sub-Saharan Africa through much of the slave-trading era. By the same token, the trade goods which European slavers brought in order to purchase slaves was the principal sub-Saharan import trade. Throughout the slave era, the interior of Africa remained largely unknown to Europeans; thus, it was African merchants and other entrepreneurs who organized the trade within Africa.

Our concern here is with the internal slave trade in those parts of West Africa that eventually became influenced by the European slave trade. Separate slave trades existed in East Africa, supplying Middle Eastern markets, but these trades lie outside our area of concern. For simplicity, we will henceforth say simply "Africa," with the understanding that only certain portions of sub-Saharan West Africa are actually meant.

Slavery of various sorts was a long-established social institution in many

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n the Muslim world, where both the Ottoman and Mameluke empires were based upon slave-soldiers. Where the demand for slaves was extensive, it was therefore dominated by rulers rather than by merchants supplying private demand. A state that required a large number of slaves could obtain them non-commercially, either by conquest and enslavement of neighbors, or (essentially a variation on the first) by imposing a tribute of slaves upon them. In the first of these cases, slaves were obtained by military means; in the latter, basically by taxation. However, the practice of enslaving war prisoners might lead to the development of slave-trading institutions. Near the point of capture, captives were of no particular use, and might also more easily escape. It was logical, then, to devise means by which captives could be quickly sent back from the front lines to safer holding areas. Moreover, any surpluses over state needs then made available to private buyers for whatever price they would fetch. Thus any aggressive state taking large numbers of slaves by capture was well-positioned to develop the institutions needed for a large-scale commercial slave trade. No available data tell us the volume of slave-trading within Africa b

Category: History - T