European Expansion in Africa - Essay Example

Currently, the literature on the costs and benefits of the Atlantic slave trade for Africa generally distinguishes between private and social costs and benefits. It is generally agreed that those who raided and took captives, and the African traders who bought and sold the captives, all realized private gains. No quantifiable evidence exists for detailed measurement of the private gains and losses. But one can argue based on human rationality that the raiders and traders would not have sustained the captive business for centuries if there had been no private gains. Given the low prices at which the captives were sold for export, the questions have been raised of why it was not privately more profitable for hegemonic African states to accept tribute from potential captives rather than capturing and selling them; and why it was not privately more profitable for African slaveholders to employ the captives to produce goods and services for the domestic markets rather than selling the captives for export.

It is generally accepted that the export centers on the African coast benefited economically and demographically from the trade. Where they succeeded in insulating themselves from the sociopolitical upheavals provoked by the trade-in their hinterlands, these port towns (or city-states) realized short-term benefits that have been equated with private gains. Market production of agricultural commodities to meet the limited needs of the slave ships for foodstuffs was stimulated, their populations expanded as the coastal traders retained some of the captives for their business needs and the production of their subsistence products, and so on. These port towns or city-states typically grew as enclave economies.

Some historians believe that these private and short-term microregional gains were also social or macroregional benefits. This view has been criticized for its failure to take into account the devastating consequences of the trade for the much larger regions from which the captives were violently procured. Other researchers, employing structural analysis and discussing opportunity costs, describe the far-reaching social costs of the trade for African societies. It has been argued, for example, that the Atlantic slave trade transferred to the New World part of Africa's relative advantage in the production of commodities for the evolving world market, and that this retarded the growth and development of commodity production for international trade in Africa. In turn, this helped to delay the development of market institutions and the general commercialization of economic activities in Africa.

It has also been argued that the slave trade helped to structure African societies in ways that were inimical to capitalist development in Africa. The growth of chattel slavery in Africa has been linked specifically to the Atlantic slave trade (Klein and Lovejoy, 1979), as has been the phenomenon of political fragmentation in nineteenth-century Africa. This phenomenon was characterized by the existence of systems of small-sized states, limited in geographical extent and population, and dominated by military aristocracies. It is argued that politically the size and class structure of these state systems (which were a function of the Atlantic trade) was unfavorable to capitalist development.

The controversy surrounding the structural analysis, as it relates to the societies of Western Sudan. The debate originated from the critical response of Senegalese and French historians to the arguments of Philip Curtin (1975). Curtin treated the slave trade in Senegambia as having developed much like any other type of trade. He did not address the issue of the structural impact of the slave trade on Senegalese societies. The Senegalese and French historians, in their efforts to demonstrate the historical origins of contemporary societal problems in Senegambia, reacted by detailing the structural impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Senegambian societies. The Atlantic trade transformed the class character of the state systems, causing them to become dominated by the warrior class. Widespread insecurity and exploitation by warrior aristocracies drove the masses to seek protection under Muslim leadership. This Islamic alternative, intended to contain the disruptive effects of the Atlantic trade, was soon caught up in the vicious circle of the forces it sought to control and ended up depending on slaving for survival. It is argued that the socio-economic and political upheavals associated with the Atlantic slave trade also aggravated the effects of droughts on food supply and "eroded traditional mechanisms for dealing with natural disaster".

Slavery in the Sudanese region of West Africa developed originally in response to the socio-economic and political conditions created by the trans-Saharan slave trade, but the system was later sustained by the expansion of transatlantic slave exports. The growing enslavement of people in the Hausa states, used to supply the Atlantic trade from the 1780s, was a major factor in the jihad, aimed at suppressing slavery, that led to the creation of the Sokoto Caliphate in the early nineteenth century. This is much in line with developments in Western Sudan discussed by Klein. To stress this point, the leader of the Sokoto jihad in northern Nigeria was called "a Muslim William Wilberforce." But, like its counterparts in Western Sudan, the Sokoto Caliphate soon became a major slaving machine, producing captives for export as well as for internal use. By the time it was taken over by the British in the early twentieth century, as Hogendom and Lovejoy tell us, about 25% of the roughly Io million people in all the emirates of the caliphate were slaves.

The contradiction in the British colonial administration was that it consolidated and extended the influence, if not the real power, of the feudal class upon which it relied for the administration of its northern territories. And this was the very class that held the slaves. Abolition of slavery in northern Nigeria, therefore, became a delicate political issue for the British colonial state in Nigeria. Lord Lugard's ingenious handling of this delicate matter is presented in minute detail by Hogendorn and Lovejoy.