Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T00:23:14.438Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Sortings and ‘Ounce Trade’ in the West African Slave Trade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Extract

The records of trading between Africans and Europeans on the Guinea Coast since antiquity raise issues the practical resolution of which has never ceased to occupy economic historians. The Herodotean inadequacies of dumb barter in Carthaginian goods and in gold dust were fully resolved only at the time of the eighteenth-century slave trade. In Senegambia and even on the Windward Coast, as we now know, the Royal African Company had still to go without an effective profit-and-loss accountancy. With the advent of the regular slave trade two new commercial devices had to be introduced by the Europeans. Both the ‘sorting’ and the ‘ounce trade’ sprang from the vital need for adjustment between the radically different trading methods of Europeans and Africans. And it was not so much a case of mutual adjustment, for of the two systems only one, the European, adjusted.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1964

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.)

References

1 Contributed by Professor George Dalton, Northwestern University.Google Scholar

1A I am indebted to Mr Abraham Rotstein, Lecturer in Economics, University of Toronto, for substantial help in resolving some of the problems of Slave Coast economics.Google Scholar

2 Herodotus, iv, 196.Google Scholar

3 Davies, K. G., The Royal African Company (1957);Google ScholarWyndham, H. A., The Atlantic and Slavery (1935).Google Scholar

4 Cf. Polanyi, K., ‘The economy as an instituted process’, in Polanyi, K., Arensberg, C. M. and Pearson, H. W. (eds.), Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe, Ill., 1957), 263.Google Scholar

5 Davies, op. Cit. 238.Google Scholar

6 Isert, P. E., Voyages en Guinée et dans les îles caraībes en Amérique (Paris, 1793), 110–11.Google Scholar

7 Barbot, James Jr, Churchill's Voyages, v (London, 1746).Google Scholar

8 Bosman, W., ‘A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea’, in Pinkerton, J. (ed.), Voyages and Travels (London, 1814), XVI.Google Scholar

9 Phillips, Th., ‘A Journal of a Voyage to Africa and Barbadoes’, Churchill's Voyages (London, 1746), VI. p. 211.Google Scholar

10 Newbury, C. W., The Western Slave Coast and its Rulers (Oxford, 1961), 22.Google Scholar

11 Dalzel, A., in Parliamentary Papers (1789).Google Scholar

12 Atkins, J., Voyages to Guinea, Brash and the West Indies (London, 1737), 74.Google Scholar

13 Barbot, John A., ‘A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea’, Churchill's Voyages (London 1746), V, 330.Google Scholar

14 Bosman, 503.Google Scholar

15 Cf. pp. 392–3.Google Scholar

16 Labat, Fr. J. B., Voyage du Chevalier Des Marchais En Guinée (Amsterdam, 1731), 11, 91.Google Scholar

17 Dalzel, A., A History of Dahomey (London, 1793), 135.Google Scholar

18 M'Leod, J., A Voyage to Africa with some Account of the Manners and Customs of the Dahomian People (London, 1820), 90.Google Scholar

19 1789 Committee, 191.Google Scholar

20 Berbain, S., Le comptoir français de Juda (Ouidah) au XVIIe siècle, Mémoires de IFAN, No. 3 (Paris, 1942).Google Scholar

21 Davies, op. cit. 236–7.Google Scholar

22 Davies, ibid. 237.

23 Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, new series, XXXIX (1929), 379ff.Google Scholar

24 Davies, op. cit. 236.Google Scholar

25 Dunglas, E., ‘Contribution à l'histoire du Moyen-Dahomey’ (Royaumes d'Abomey, de Ketou et de Ouidah), Etudes Dahoméennes, XIX–XXI, IFAN (Porto Novo, 1957), 137.Google Scholar