The “Atlantic Slave Trade” as Byproduct of Slaving within Africa

Africanists know, though non-specialists may not fully appreciate, the historical dynamics of population movements within Africa that generated the familiar sales of people to Europeans in “The Atlantic Slave Trade”.  This paper will synthesize the extensive literature on intra-African slaving to shift the focus from European purchases of people to Africans’ acquisitions of the Europeans’ trade goods.  Africans selling the people whom Europeans enslaved effectively invested humans of little value to them personally in imported wares of great value in establishing social relationships in Africa.  The extent to which exchange ratios for people against European goods against people favored African investors in imports would imply that the numbers of people moved within Africa, through slaving, exceeded the numbers sold off into the Atlantic.  It would also account for Africans’ willingness, indeed eagerness, to meet Europeans’ demand for enslaved labor, even at the cost of the people lost.

The paper will thus as explore the financial logic of three centuries of exchanges that effectively produced significant private gain for some Africans at significant social cost to the continent as a whole.  It is, of course, impossible to quantify these exchanges, but this modeling/schematic approach identifies relevant costs and their relationships – direct or inverse – to gains assigned to categories of persons within Africa.  The paper will thus introduce non-Africanists to the African analytical categories more relevant to understanding the continent’s social demography than the artificial ethnic labels and ethnographic abstractions (e.g. “states/stateless societies”) commonly employed. The author will draw on some forty years’ experience studying enslavement within Africa in the context of world-wide patterns of slaving.