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10 - Africa: Slavery and the World Economy, 1700–1870

from Part I - Regional Developments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2021

By
Patrick Manning
Edited by
Stephen Broadberry  and
Kyoji Fukao
Stephen Broadberry
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Kyoji Fukao
Affiliation:
Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo
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Summary

African economies were globally integrated yet regionally autonomous. This chapter addresses volume and direction of slave trade, continental and regional export value, and theories of economic growth and enslavement. Details address the varying regional peaks in slave trade as related to warfare, population, regional social orders, and gender relations. The overseas diaspora grew to 10% of the African total of some 140 million. African economies felt the effects of imperial rivalries and global trade, notably in textiles. (Large-scale colonial rule came only after 1870.) The eighteenth century brought expanding overseas slave trade and its steady incursions into domestic economies. The nineteenth century brought a mix of economic changes. Silver became key to African currencies; peasant agricultural exports rose, but only the post-1870 exports of South African diamonds and gold exports exceeded slave-trade earnings. In the ‘second slavery’, African enslavement reached a mid-century peak, in parallel to current maritime Asian and New World plantations. Analysis of African economies benefits from growing collections of empirical data; contending theories on enslavement, the domestic economy, and overseas trade – developed over half a century of analysis – can be strengthened in global context.

Keywords

Africaempiresenslavementexport valuegrowthpopulationregionsslave tradetheorytextiles
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World , pp. 246 - 264
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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