Is the answer to the question of 'who were the losers and who were the winners in the trans-Atlantic slave trade' self-evident? (original) (raw)

The legacies of slavery in and out of Africa

IZA Journal of Migration, 2016

The Legacies of Slavery in and out of Africa * The slave trades out of Africa represent one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history. In this paper I illustrate their long-term consequences. I first consider the influence of the slave trade on the "sending" countries in Africa, with attention to their economic, institutional, demographic, and social implications. Next I evaluate the consequences of the slave trade on the "receiving" countries in the Americas. Here I distinguish between the case of Latin America and that of the United States. For the latter, I further discuss the subsequent migration experiences of the Second Middle Passage, when African slaves were transported, again forcibly, from the coastal regions to the inland, and of the Great Migration, when as free people they chose to leave the deep South for the Northern cities.

How the International Slave Trades Underdeveloped Africa

The Journal of Economic History

I use newly-developed data on Africa to estimate the effects of the international slave trades (circa 1500–1850) on the institutional structures of African economies and societies (circa 1900). I find that: (1) societies in slave catchment zones adopted slavery to defend against further enslavement; (2) slave trades spread slavery and polygyny together; (3) politically centralized aristocratic slave regimes emerge in West Africa and family-based accumulations of slave wealth in East Africa. I discuss implications for literatures on long-term legacies in African political and economic development.

The African Slave Trade Across the Atlantic and its Social and Economic Impacts

2015

The Atlantic slave trade imprisoned the development of the African countries on the basis of supporting the West. I argue that the Atlantic slave trade, enforced by European traders, was responsible for the exploitation of African countries by means of causing social cataclysms, political illegitimacies and instabilities and economic despair. In the following reading, I will demonstrate how the Atlantic slave trade has caused the Africans social and economic despair by means of looking at demographic figures, gendered relations and other political and economic factors.

On the causes of the African Slave Trade

This paper offers an integrated analysis of the forces shaping the emergence of the African slave trade over the early modern period. We focus our attention on two questions. First, why most of the increase in the demand for slaves during this period came exclusively from western Europeans. Second, and of most relevance for present-day development outcomes, why was the overwhelming majority of slaves of African origin. Technological differences in manufacturing technology, the specificities of sugar (and other crops') production, and the cultural fragmentation of the African continent all play a role in the analysis. Supporting evidence for each of our claims is provided from a broad corpus of relevant literature.

The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades

Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question empirically, I combined data from ship records with data from various historical documents reporting slave ethnicities, and construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave trades between 1400 and 1900. I find a strong robust negative correlation between the number of slaves exported from a country and its current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades, I use instrumental variables, and I control for observable country characteristics. The results suggest that the relationship between slave exports and current economic performance is causal. I then test for potential channels of causality. Consistent with the historic evidence, the data indicate that the effects of the slave trades are through ethnic frac-tionalization, weakened states, and a decline in the quality of domestic institutions.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade and local political fragmentation in Africa

Political institutions and the balance of political power strongly influence the evolution of economic institutions, making them important for economic growth. The nature of political institutions and the distribution of political power and influence, in their turn, can be significantly affected by major events (Acemoglu, Robinson & Johnson 2005). As I show in my article, political institutions in Africa were substantially affected by such a major event, the transAtlantic slave trade (Obikili 2016a). Long-run effects of the transAtlantic slave trade

Patterns in regulation and collaboration in the slave trade of West Africa

2007

The transatlantic slave trade from West Africa involved the enforced migration of over 6.3 million people between the middle of the sixteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century. 1 The involvement of Africans in this slave trade was complex. They were victims on the one hand, wrenched from their homes through violence and forcibly moved over great distances to uncertain destinations. Many enslaved Africans never left the continent-how many is not known. Besides them, millions were sent to the Americas or crossed the Sahara. On the other hand, Africans also enabled the slave trade. A highly sophisticated commercial network made the movement of population possible through trade. Without the activities of African merchants this trade could not have taken place. As agents of the slave trade, merchants were responsible for distributing the slaves that were produced by a political structure that was enslaving people. It is difficult to separate these various overlapping elements of the slave trade. However, there is no question that African agency was an essential component of the transatlantic trade. The involvement of governments and commercial networks inevitably meant that the trade was regulated and resulted in government intervention in this enforced population displacement. How effective such intervention was can be gleaned by a comparison of two distinct and separate parts of Africa that fed significant numbers of enslaved Africans into the Atlantic trade. There was considerable variation in the organization and regulation of the migration of slaves and specifically the extent to which African governments and commercial enterprises facilitated migration or otherwise restricted or regulated the slave trade. The economics of supply and demand ultimately motivated this commercialized population displacement. 1 The research on the Bight of Biafra has been done in collaboration with David Richardson, as revealed in the notes, but the comparisons made here are my own responsibility. The estimates of the transatlantic slave trade are derived from the expanded Voyage Database of David Eltis, Manolo Florentino, David Richardson, and Stephen Behrendt, Emory University. I am grateful for permission to cite the database.

TO WHAT EXTENT DID TRANS ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE UNDERDEVELOP AFRICA

The Transatlantic slave trade drastically diminished Africa’s potential to economically develop and to maintain its stability socially and politically. The arrival of Europeans on the West African Coast and their establishment of slave ports in various parts of the continent triggered a continuous process of exploitation of Africa’s human resources, labor, and commodities. This exploitative trade influenced major segments of the African political and religious upper crust, the warrior classes, and the biracial elite, who were making small gains from the slave trade, to this they participated or even championed in the oppression of their own people. Nevertheless, the Europeans benefited from the transatlantic slave trade the most, since the trade allowed them to amass the raw materials that fed their Industrial Revolution at the detriment of African societies whose peace and capacity to transform their modes of production into a viable entrepreneurial economy was severely stopped. The slave trade not only led to the violent transportation overseas of millions of Africans but also to the deaths of many millions more. In this paper we will examine the extent in specifics to which the transatlantic slave under developed the African continent.

The Internal African Slave Trade as History and Representation

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2023

The internal African slave trade is a key topic to understand the political, cultural, and economic history of Africa. As a colonial category, the concept emerged throughout the 19th century as European imperial powers, spearheaded by European antislavery movements, constructed a discourse of abolition associated with the expansion of commerce, Christianity, and civilization. In the process, European imperial agents increasingly challenged the political sovereignty of African states and laid the ground for the discourse of racial inferiority of Africans. At the same time, the term also refers, then as now, to the expansion of the internal slave trade within the continent after 1850. Slavers in different parts of the continent continued to move people across the landscape to provide human labor, this time not for slave ships along the Atlantic coast but for the development of economic undertakings within the continent itself, such as clove plantations on Africa´s east coast, palm oil in West Africa, and the onset of coffee and sugar plantations in Angola. As a colonial and historical category, the internal slave trade is crucial to understanding 19th-century Africa. Moreover, with discoveries in archaeology and historical linguistics, the internal slave trade has been shown to have a much older history, connected with the making of polities in Northeast Africa such as Egypt and Meroë, the trade in slaves and gold in West Africa from the time of the Garamantes to the expansion of Mali, and the settlement of Bantu-speaking villages in Central Africa in the last millennium BCE. In this way, the internal African slave trade was not one but many; internal slave trades were, rather, locally generated and emerged in different periods and places in response to distinct contexts and motivations. Therefore, the 19th-century internal African slave trade, with its spin-off stereotyped representation of a continent without history, needs to be supplemented by an understanding of the multiple slave trades in Africa's early past, as evidenced by historical linguistics and archaeology.