Chapter 4 also focuses on the Afro-Indian pivot of the FGE by highlighting interconnections between African slavers, consumers/prosumers and Indian cotton textile trade/production in the making of the FGE. The first section brings the power and agency of African slavers to the fore, revealing how they were able to negotiate with the European slavers from a position of equality and often strength. The Africans had developed a vast infrastructure and knowledge pool in their dealings with the Muslims since the seventh century when the Islamic slave trade first emerged in Africa. Critically, the Africans preferred Indian cotton textiles (ICTs) to the Manchester ‘fustians’ right through to the latter part of the eighteenth century. This reflected the strength of Gujarati Indian merchants and the weakness of their British counterparts. The chapter also interrogates fundamentalist postcolonialism's ‘anti-racist refusal’ to recognise the power and agency of the African slavers. Finally, the chapter reveals the entangled agencies of the African slavers and prosumers along with the Gujarati Indian textile merchant capitalists. The latter formed symbiotic bonds with African middlemen (Vashambadzi and Patamares) which, inter alia, gave Indian merchants a considerable advantage over the Portuguese.

Chapter 8 advances further my claim concerning the existence of the first global economy (FGE) by revealing its ‘historical capitalist’ nature. This responds to the fundamentalist-Marxist position which asserts that a global economy could not have existed before the nineteenth century because capitalist social relations of production were not universal and that the world rested largely on an agrarian foundation and only weak trans-continental trading linkages. I draw on a range of eclectic Marxists and Braudel in outlining the contours of ‘historical capitalism’, which comprises a hybrid set of social relations—part-modern capitalist/part-agrarian—together with rational institutions and global trade. I then advance a detailed analysis of how the principal global trading commodities were produced within the global historical capitalist mode of production. Here the analysis of Caribbean slave production provides the litmus test for my claim that historical rather than purely modern capitalism existed before about 1850, simultaneously revealing that the dividing line between the two modes of production can be wafer thin. I then reveal the rational commercial and financial institutions of historical capitalism, in the absence of which global trade could not have existed before concluding with a brief summary of global trade during the FGE.

Chapter 3 is the first of four chapters that bring Indian (South Asian) agents and Indian structural power into the rise of the first global economy. This serves ultimately as a counterweight to the Sinocentrism of parts of the California School as well as Eurocentrism's and Eurofetishism's exclusive focus on Western hyper-agency. Critical here is the focus on Indian cotton textile (ICT) exports that wove together the FGE. They armed Indian merchant capitalists with a nascent global structural power that was vital in organising the global trading and production systems. It also discusses the Afro-Indian pivot of the FGE. The first section provincialises the Atlantic ‘triangular trading system’ by revealing the ‘global-Atlantic system’ in the context of the global silver trading system. The second section focuses on how the ICT-trading system wove together the FGE while being embedded within the global silver system. And the role of ICTs was pivotal to the African slave trade, comprising the major currency to purchase slaves. ICTs also constituted a global super-commodity chain that nurtured other global production/commodity chains. Finally, the chapter reveals the heptagonal African slave trade system that spanned the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, comprising the European, Islamic and Indian slave trades.