Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T03:09:40.912Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

AFRICA AND THE PRICE REVOLUTION: CURRENCY IMPORTS AND SOCIOECONOMIC CHANGE IN WEST AND WEST-CENTRAL AFRICA DURING THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2016

TOBY GREEN
TOBY GREEN*
Affiliation:
King's College London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The past decade has seen much ink spilled on global interconnections in the early modern economy, especially those linking European and Asian economies. But this Eurasian concentration has excluded Africa from the discussion. This article addresses this absence by showing that West and West-Central Africa were integral to the global price revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Considering evidence from West and West-Central Africa reveals how the price revolution was a genuinely global phenomenon, with increasing imports of locally-used currencies that created inflation in line with the inflation of gold and silver in Europe and Asia. The article argues that the coexistence of exchangeable value and other social uses of currencies also contributed to a relative depreciation in Africa's global economic strength. Also related to this phenomenon were the rise of an export slave trade and changes in the production and distribution of West and West-Central African cloth industries.

Keywords

West AfricaWest-Central Africaprice revolutioncurrenciesAfrican economic historyglobal history
Type
Global Currency Trade and Economic Transformation in Western Africa
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust, who provided generous funding throughout the three years in which the research for this article was undertaken. Mamadou Diouf, Richard Drayton, Bronwen Everill, Jane Guyer, Tony Hopkins, Paul Lovejoy, Linda Newson, Benedetta Rossi, Alexandra Sapoznik, the editors, and various anonymous reviewers have all read drafts of this article and have given me very helpful advice. Author's email: [email protected]

References

1 E. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge, MA, 1934); Elliott, J. H., ‘The decline of Spain’, Past and Present, 20:2 (1961), 54–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT, 2000), 120–7, 146.

2 K. Nimako and G. Willemsen, The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (London, 2011), 77; for a prolix exemplar of this trend, see J. de Vries and A. de Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, 1997).

3 See also A. G. Frank, ReOrient: The Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998).

4 Flynn, D. O. and Giraldez, A., ‘Born with a silver spoon’: the origin of world trade in 1571’, Journal of World History, 6:2 (1995), 211Google Scholar.

5 Flynn, D. O. and Giraldez, A., ‘China and the Spanish Empire’, Revista de História Económica, 14:2 (1996)Google Scholar.

6 Inikori, J. E., ‘Africa and the globalization process: Western Africa, 1450–1850’, Journal of Global History, 2:1 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lovejoy, P. E., ‘Interregional monetary flows in the precolonial trade of Nigeria’, The Journal of African History, 15:4 (1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Os Descobrimentos e a Economia Mundial, 4 Volumes (Lisbon, 1981).

8 B. Heintze, Fontes para a História de Angola do Século XVII, Volume 1: Memórias, Relações e Outros Manuscritos da Colectânea Documental de Fernão de Sousa (1622–1635) (Stuttgart, 1985), 9. Seventeenth-century Portuguese maps of Mozambique also show similar concerns there, showing how this European interest in minerals spread across Africa.

9 Hamilton, American Treasure, 195. For documents, see A. Brásio, Monumenta Misionária Africana, África Ocidental, Volume VI (Lisbon, 1953–88 [15 vols.]), 31–3, 522.

10 D. O. Flynn and A. Giraldez, Metals and Monies in an Emerging Global Economy (Aldershot, 1997), 323; see also C. R. Boxer, ‘Plata es sangre: sidelights on the drain of Spanish-American silver in the Far East’, in D. O. Flynn, A. Giraldez, and J. Sobredo (eds.), European Entry into the Pacific: Spain and the Acapulco-Manila Galleons (Aldershot, 2001), 168.

11 Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (AHU), Conselho Ultramarino (CU), Angola, Caixa 5, Doc. 51, 21 June 1651; AHU CU, Caixa 6, Doc. 72, 25 Feb. 1656.

12 Nimako and Willemsen, The Dutch Atlantic, 53.

13 Kuroda, A., ‘What is the complementarity among monies? An introductory note’, Financial History, 15:1 (2008), 7–15Google Scholar.

14 Kuroda, A., ‘The Maria Theresa Dollar in the early twentieth-century Red Sea region: a complementary interface between multiple markets’, Financial History Review, 14:1 (2007), 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973); R. Austen, African Economic History (London, 1987).

16 Reid, R., ‘Past and presentism: the “pre-colonial” and the foreshortening of African history’, The Journal of African History, 52:2 (2011), 135–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 J. I. Guyer, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (Chicago, 2004), 4.

18 Guyer, J. I., ‘Soft currencies, cash economies, new monies: past and present’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109:7 (2012), 2214CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

19 R. A. Kea, Settlement, Trade and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore, 1982), 187.

20 Hopkins, A. G., ‘The new economic history of Africa’, The Journal of African History, 50:2 (2009), 155–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (New York, 2012); Nunn, N., ‘Historical legacies: a model linking Africa's past to its current underdevelopment’, Journal of Development Economics, 83:1 (2007), 157–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Austin, G., ‘The “reversal of fortune” thesis and the compression of history: perspectives from African and comparative economic history’, Journal of International Development, 20:8 (2008), 996–1027CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Lovejoy, ‘Interregional monetary flows’, 564, 583.

22 Inikori, ‘Africa and the globalization process’, 83, 86.

23 P. D. Curtin, ‘Africa and the wider monetary world, 1250–1850’, in J. F. Richards (ed.), Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Durham, NC, 1983), 232–33. Although not widely cited in economic histories of Atlantic Africa, many documents attest to the import of nzimbu from Brazil to Angola: see Brásio, Monumenta Misionária Africana, África Ocidental VI, 108, 342–3, and Volume VII, 504. The import of nzimbu is however noted in L. Sündstrom, The Exchange Economy of Pre-colonial Tropical Africa (London, 1974), 95, and also in J. Hogendorn and M. Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1986), 101.

24 Lovejoy, ‘Interregional monetary flows’, 568–9.

25 V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN, 1988).

26 Inflation could also – as this article shows – accompany market growth; see Lovejoy, ‘Interregional monetary flows’, 565, for a strong argument on how inflation of cowries in Nigeria from the late eighteenth-century onwards was a symptom of the expansion of the capital market inland from the coast.

27 Ogundiran, A., ‘Of small things remembered: beads, cowries, and cultural translations of the Atlantic experience in Yorubaland’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 35:2–3 (2002), 427–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 J. C. Miller, ‘Worlds apart: Africans’ encounters and Africa's encounters with the Atlantic in Angola, before 1800’, Actas do Seminário Encontro de Povos e Culturas em Angola (Lisbon, 1997), 239–40.

29 I am grateful to P. E. Lovejoy for this point.

30 G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. T. Bottomore and D. Frisby (London, 1990).

31 Hiskett, M., ‘Materials relating to the cowrie currency of the western Sudan’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 29:1–2 (1966), 357Google Scholar; cf. also fns. 118–19.

32 Sündstrom, Exchange Economy, 161.

33 Ogundiran, ‘Of small things remembered’, 448–55.

34 Austin, G., ‘Reciprocal comparison and African history: tackling conceptual Eurocentrism in the study of Africa's economic past’, African Studies Review, 50:3 (2007), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 See, for example, Lovejoy, ‘Interregional monetary flows’, 563; and for a good recent summary of the debates, M. Candotti, Cotton Growing and Textile Production in Northern Nigeria: From Caliphate to Protectorate, c. 1804–1914 (unpublished PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 2015), 181–93.

36 Guyer, Marginal Gains, x.

37 Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money, 3; Lovejoy, ‘Interregional monetary flows’, 576; Sündstrom, Exchange Economy, 95, 103.

38 On cowrie depreciation in the nineteenth century, see also Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money; Sündstrom, Exchange Economy, 76.

39 For general background to this region, see especially I. Akinjogbin, Dahomey and its Neighbours: 1708–1818 (Cambridge, 1967); J. Bato`ora Ballong-wen-Menuda, São Jorge da Mina, 1482–1637: la Vie d'un Comptoir Portugais en Afrique Occidentale, 2 Volumes (Paris and Lisbon, 1993); H. den Heijer, Goud, Ivoor en Slaven: Scheepvaart en Handel van de Tweede Westindische Compagnie op Afrika, 1674–1740 (Zutphens, 1997); R. Law, The Kingdom of Allada ( Leiden, 1997); F. R. da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa: Empires, Merchants and the Atlantic System, 1580–1674 (Leiden, 2011); Ryder, A. F. C., ‘Dutch trade on the Nigeria coast in the seventeenth century’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 3:2 (1965), 195–210Google Scholar; J. L. Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast (1469–1682) (Athens, OH, 1979). Note that Allada is also known as Arda and Ardra in the documentation.

40 N. Ngou-Mve, El Africa Bantú en la Colonización de México (Madrid, 1994), 43, 170.

41 Wheat, D., ‘The first great waves: African provenance zones for the transatlantic slave trade to Cartagena de Indias, 1570–1640’, The Journal of African History, 52:1 (2011), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 19.

42 AHU CU, São Tomé, Caixa 1, doc. 99; D. Northrup, Trade Without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford, 1978), 51.

43 S. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Piligrimes Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travels by Englishmen and Others, Volume VI (Glasgow, 1905), 353.

44 R. Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society, 1550–1750 (Oxford, 1991). See also J. D. LaFleur, Fusion Foodways of Africa's Gold Coast in the Atlantic Era (Leiden, 2012), 113–6. On the seventeenth-century trade, see Law, Slave Coast, 11 and K. Ratelband, Vijf Dagregisters van het Kasteel São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) aan de Goudkust 1645–1647 (‘S-Gravenhage, 1953), 320.

45 M. Calado, O Valeroso Lucideno e Triumpho da Liberdade (Lisbon, 1648), 161.

46 S. P. l'Honoré Naber (ed.), Toortse der Zee-vaart door Dierick Ruiters 1623 (‘S-Gravenhage, 1913), 76. It is possible that Ruiters relied on some of the Portuguese sources cited below – see Ryder, ‘Dutch trade’, 197.

47 Biblioteca da Ájuda, Lisbon (BA), Códice 51 – IX -25, fol. 74r.

48 A. Brásio, Monumenta Misionária Africana: África Ocidental: Segunda Série, Volume V (1958–2004), 293.

49 Kriger, C. E., ‘Textile production in the lower Niger basin: new evidence from the 1841 Niger expedition collection’, Textile History, 21:1 (1990), 31–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; T. Shaw, Igbo-Ukwu: An Account of Archaeological Discoveries in Eastern Nigeria (Evanston, IL, 1970).

50 Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, DL 31/02/31, ‘chegava de volta da sua viagem [pela Costa] desembarcava escravos e Panos pa[ra] a Alfa[ndega]’. This export of cloth is noted by Kriger: C. E. Kriger, ‘“Guinea-cloth”: production and consumption of cotton textiles in West Africa before and during the Atlantic slave trade’, in G. Riello and P. Parthasarathi (eds.), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford, 2011), 112–13.

51 L. Jadin (ed.), L'Ancien Congo et l'Angola 1649–1655, d'Après les Archives Romaines, Portugaises, Néerlandaises et Espagnoles, Volume I (Brussels and Rome, 1975), 122. On cloth purchased by the Dutch in the 1640s, see also Ryder, ‘Dutch trade’, 203.

52 Jadin, Congo et l'Angola I, 219. Some of this cloth was also manufactured in the small kingdom of Xabu. BA, Códice 51-IX-25, fol. 74r.

53 l’Honoré Naber, S. P., ‘Nota van Pieter Mortamer over het Gewest Angola’, Bijdragen en mededeelingen van het historisch genootschap, 54 (1934), 33Google Scholar.

54 C. T. Gehring and J. A. Schiltkamp (eds.), Curação Papers 1640–1665 (Interlaken, 1987), 79.

55 N. I. de Moraes, À la Découverte de la Petite Côte au XVIIème siècle (Sénégal et Gambie), Volume III (Dakar, 1998), 299.

56 Arquivo da Santa Casa da Misericórdia da Bahia, Salvador, Maço 41, Livro do Tombo (2), fol. 406r.

57 BA, Códice 51 – IX -25, fols. 74r–v.

58 J. A. Gonsalves de Mello, Fontes Para a História do Brasil Holandês (Recife, 2004), 107.

59 Ratelband, Vijf Dagregisters, 36–7, 148; Jadin, Congo et l'Angola I, 271, 280.

60 Ibid. 281.

61 S. Delbée, ‘Journal du voyage du Sieur Delbée, Commissaire General de la Marine, aux isles, dans la coste de Guynée, pour l’établissement du commerce dans ces pays, dans l'annee 1669’, Relation de ce qui s'est passé, dans ces isles & Terre-Ferme de l'Amérique, pendant la dernière guerre avec l'Angleterre, & depuis en execution de la traite de Bréda (Paris, 1671), 382–9.

62 Yang, B., ‘Horses, silver and cowries: Yunnan in historical perspective’, Journal of World History, 15:3 (2004), 305–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 See G. Riello and T. Roy (eds.), How India Clothed the World: the World of South Asian Textiles, 1500 – 1850 (Leiden, 2009); especially the chapter by J. E, Inikori, ‘English versus Indian cotton textiles: the impact of imports on cotton textile production in West Africa’.

64 Johnson, M., ‘The cowrie currencies of West Africa’, The Journal of African History, 11:1–3 (1970)Google Scholar; Johnson, M., ‘The nineteenth-century gold “mithqal” in West and North Africa’, The Journal of African History, 9:4 (1968), 547–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money. See also M. Hiskett, ‘Materials’; and on gold weights in use until the nineteenth century, Garrard, T. F., ‘Myth and metrology: the early trans-Saharan gold trade’, The Journal of African History, 23:4 (1982), 443–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 See, for example, Hogendorn and Johnson, The Shell Money, 36 where a lack of archival data on the subject is suggested.

66 See A. H. Quiggin, A Survey of Primitive Money: The Beginnings of Currency (London, 1949); Dalton, G., ‘Primitive money’, American Anthropologist, 67:1 (1964), 44–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique, see Sündstrom, Exchange Economy, 86.

67 O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1982) 167–8.

68 T. Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York, 1992), 38.

69 Flynn, D. O. and Giraldez, A., ‘Cycles of silver: global economic unity through the eighteenth century’, Journal of World History, 13:2 (2002), 397CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Garrard, ‘Myth and metrology’.

71 Inikori, ‘Africa and the globalization process’.

72 Martin, P. M., ‘Power, cloth and currency on the Loango coast’, African Economic History, 15 (1986), 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 For the early period, see T. Green, The Rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge, 2012), 118. On seventeenth-century exchanges, see below fn. 97. See also P. E. Lovejoy, Caravans of Kola: The Hausa Kola Trade, 1700–1900 (Zaria, 1980).

74 E. W. Herbert, Red Gold of Africa: Copper in Precolonial History and Culture (Madison, WI, 1984), 126.

75 Johnson, ‘Cowrie currencies of West Africa’, 37, 332. See also Lovejoy, ‘Interregional monetary flows’, 565, 570, arguing that these cowries flowed northwards; and Hiskett, ‘Materials’, 357, who argues that the value of the mithqal in cowries in northern Nigeria rose sharply in the eighteenth century, suggesting a flow northwards.

76 I. Wilks, Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante (Athens, OH, 1993), 5–17.

77 I. Blanchard, Russia's Age of Silver: Precious-Metal Production and Economic Growth in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1989), 25–7.

78 Kea, Trade, Settlements and Polities, 194.

79 Stone, T. G., ‘The journey of Cornelius Hodges in Senegambia, 1689–90’, English Historical Review, 39:153 (1924), 91–3Google Scholar.

80 N. Levtzion, Muslims and Chiefs in West Africa: A Study of Islam in the Middle Volta Basin in the Pre-Colonial Period (Oxford, 1968), 18.

81 Lovejoy, Caravans, 14–15. Northrup, Trade Without Rulers, 158, also suggests that the Igbo-Ukwu adopted cowries as a currency in the eighteenth century.

82 R. Ferreira, ‘From Brazil to West Africa: Dutch-Portuguese rivalry, gold-smuggling, and African politics in the Bight of Benin’, in M. van Groesen (ed.), The Legacy of Dutch Brazil (Cambridge, 2014), ch. 6.

83 See fn. 19.

84 M. de Ruyter and J. C. van Meppelen, Journael Gehouden op ‘s landts-schip de Spiegel (Amsterdam, 1665), 52.

85 Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money, 15–19; Johnson, ‘Cowrie currencies of West Africa’, 18–19.

86 Brásio, Monumenta Misionária Africana, África Ocidental I (1953), 515.

87 R. Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island 1470–1655: The Key to Guinea (San Francisco, 1992), 34.

88 Johnson, ‘Cowrie currencies of West Africa’, 347.

89 Herbert, Red Gold of Africa, 133–5.

90 Nationaal Archief, The Hague (NA), Oude West Indische Compagnie (OWIC), Inventarisnummer 47, 22 Nov. 1652 and Apr. 1653.

91 A. F. C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 1485–1897 (Harlow, 1969), 53.

92 On the growth of iron bars as a currency on the Gold Coast in the mid-1640s, see Ratelband, Vijf Dagregisters, 239–40.

93 NA OWIC, Inventarisnummer 11, no. 92 – 10,0000 pieces of ordinary lijwaet cloth were imported to a value of 35,625 florins, as against 7,000 iron bars to a value of 21,000 florins; another ship of the same year imported 80,000 pieces of cloth to a value of 28,500 florins and 6,000 iron bars to a value of 18,000 florins (NA OWIC, Inventarisnummer 11, no. 107). This valuation reveals that in terms of profits these changes matter, even though the weights of the relative metal exports from the Netherlands are not known.

94 M. Anguiano, Misiones Capuchinas en Africa: Vol. 1, la Misión del Congo (Madrid, 1950), 180; Ratelband, Vijf Dagregisters, 185.

95 NA OWIC, Inventarisnummer 47, 16 Oct. 1652.

96 Archivo General de las Indias, Seville (AGIS), Escribanía, 591A, Pieza 1, fol. 33r – Manuel de Ledesma on a 1634 trading voyage to Angola noted that his trade goods in Angola were worth more than usual (‘suçedio tener las dhas mercaderias mas balor que otras vezes’); AGIS, Pieza 5, fol. 157r – Manuel Rodriguez noted the same on a 1635 voyage to Upper Guinea (‘con las mercadurias que llevo Para el resgate hiço mas caudal de que presumio por tener como subieron mas baler en aquella occasion’).

97 Archivo General de la Nación, Lima (AGNL), So-Co, Caja 18, doc. 197, fols. 553r, 576r. See also Newson, L. A., ‘The slave trading accounts of Manoel Batista Peres, 1613–1619: Double–entry bookkeeping in cloth money’, Accounting History, 18:3 (2013), 343–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 For a good general discussion, see J. K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718 (1983), 33. On the extent of the inflation, see W. G. R. Randles, L'Ancien Royaume du Congo: des Origines à la Fin du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1968), 137.

99 R. Law (ed.), The English in West Africa 1681–1683: The Local Correspondence of the Royal African Company of England (Oxford, 1997), 223.

100 A. Van Dantzig, The Dutch and the Guinea Coast 1674–1742: A Collection of Documents from the General State Archives at The Hague (Accra, 1978), 27, 111. On cowries on the Slave Coast, see also Law, The Slave Coast, 50–4.

101 Law, The English in West Africa 1681–1683, 223.

102 Van Dantzig, The Dutch and the Guinea Coast, 27, 111.

103 Inikori, ‘Africa and the globalization process’.

104 Austin, G., ‘Factor markets in Niebohr conditions: pre-colonial West Africa, c. 1500-–c. 1900’, Continuity and Change, 24:1 (2009), 23–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The view of an abundance of land in West Africa is however challenged in a new work by Assan Sarr – see Sarr, Islam, Power, and Dependency in West Africa: The Politics of Land Control in the Gambia River Basin, c. 1790s –1940s (Rochester, 2016, forthcoming).

105 Martin, ‘Power, cloth and currency on the Loango coast’, 7.

106 J. M. Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1815 (Cambridge, 1990), 60.

107 P. M. Martin, ‘The trade of Loango in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in J. E. Inikori (ed.), Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies (London, 1982), 211.

108 Guyer, Marginal Gains, 4–5.

109 Ratelband, Vijf Dagregisters Appendix K.

110 Ibid. Appendix L.

111 G. Connah, The Archaeology of Benin: Excavations and Other Researches in and around Benin City, Nigeria (Oxford, 1975), 2.

112 Herbert, Red Gold, 301–2.

113 Ibid. 121.

114 A. Parreira, Economia e Sociedade em Angola na Época da Rainha Jinga (século XVII) (Lisbon, 1990), 55–6; on the ritual value of kola see discussion by Lovejoy, Caravans, and the description by F. L. Coelho in D. Peres (ed.), Duas Descrições Seiscentistas da Guiné de Francisco Lemos Coelho (Lisbon, 1990), 38. That kola was a unit of account in Upper Guinea emerges in accounts from the 1610s, where debts are held in kola – see AGNL, So-Co, Caja 18, doc, 197, fol. 314r: ‘e asim me ficaram mais de fora desta parsaria em mão de Ant[onio] rodrigez em hum conhecimento duzentos panos pretos de Cola que lhe vendi antes de fazer esta parsaria’.

115 Ogundiran, ‘Of small things remembered’.

116 Anonymous, The Golden Coast, or a Description of Guinney (London, 1665), 17.

117 Guyer, Marginal Gains, 66.

118 For Segu, oral literatures describe how ‘the cowrie throwers scattered cowries on the floor of a room and sat down to study them’ – D. C. Conrad, A State of Intrigue: The Epic of Bamana Segu According to Tayiru Banbera (Oxford, 1990), 111. Accounts of oral divination with cowries are frequent in Kaabu orature – see National Centre for Arts and Culture, Banjul, Research and Documentation Division, Transcribed Cassette 217C.

119 Conrad, State of Intrigue, 152.

120 Ogundiran, ‘Of small things remembered’.

121 Ratelband, Vijf Dagregisters, Appendix K.

122 AHU CU, São Tomé, Caixa 2, docs. 65, 99.

123 Moraes, À la Découverte, Volume II, 241.

124 Lovejoy, Caravans, 15.

125 Eltis, D. and Jennings, L., ‘Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic world in the pre-colonial era’, American Historical Review, 93:4 (1988), 936–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999), 86; J. K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge, 1992), 44–53; Kriger, ‘Guinea-cloth’, 106, 122.

126 Lovejoy, Caravans, 11; Sündstrom, Exchange Economy, 21, 147; M. Candotti, ‘The Hausa textile industry: origins and development in the precolonial period’, in A. Haour and B. Rossi (eds.), Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Leiden, 2010), 190–94.

127 Northrup, Trade Without Rulers, 169–70.

128 V. Lamb, Looms Past and Present: Around the Mediterranean and Elsewhere (Hertingfordbury, 2005), 261.

129 Kriger, ‘Guinea-cloth’, 122.

130 Lovejoy, ‘Interregional monetary flows’.

131 F. Bontinck (ed.), Brève Relation de la Fondation de la Mission des Frères Mineurs Capucins du Seraphique Père Saint François au Royaume de Congo, et des Particularités, Coutumes et Façons de Vivre des Habitants de ce Royaume (Louvain, 1964), 85.

132 A. C. da Montecuccolo, Istorica Descrizione de’ tre’ Regni Congo, Matamba, et Angola Situati Nelli’ Etiopia Inferiore Occidentale e delle Missioni Apostoliche Esercitatevi da Religiosi Capuccini (Bologna, 1687), 61.

133 R. J. Sparks, Where the Negroes are Masters: an African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 157.

134 Connah, The Archaeology of Benin, 242; W. Bosman also suggested in 1705 that the population of Benin was smaller than in the surrounding areas – see W. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea: Divided into the Gold, the Slave and the Ivory Coasts (London, 1967), 430.

135 There were of course other contributory economic factors impoverishing Africa associated with the slave trade, which is something I am currently working on for another publication.