The Atlantic and Africa

The Second Slavery and Beyond

Dale W. Tomich, Paul E. Lovejoy, Dale W. Tomich, Paul E. Lovejoy

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438484440, 9781438484433
• eBook ISBN: 9781438484457
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Social Sciences

Traces the inner connections between the second slavery in the Americas, slavery in Africa, the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, and the "Great Transformation" of the nineteenth century world economy.

The Atlantic and Africa breaks new ground by exploring the connections between two bodies of scholarship that have developed separately from one another. On the one hand, the "second slavery" perspective that has reinterpreted the relation of Atlantic slavery and capitalism by emphasizing the extraordinary expansion of new frontiers of slave commodity production and their role in the economic, social, and political transformations of the nineteenth-century world-economy. On the other hand, Africanist scholarship that has established the importance of slavery and slave trading in Africa to the political, economic and social organization of African societies during the nineteenth century. Taken together, these two movements enable us to delineate the processes forming the capitalist world-economy, establish its specific geographical and historical structure, and reintegrates Africa into the transformations in the world economy. This volume explores this paradigm at diverse levels ranging from state formation and the reorganization of world markets to the creation of new social roles and identities.

Chapter 1

African Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

Inseparable Partner of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch

This chapter seeks to explain the extent to which the emergence of industrial capitalism in the West during the nineteenth century was closely connected to African slavery, both in the Americas and in Africa. The expansion and then the destruction of the second slavery in the Americas was intimately linked to the expansion of slavery in Africa. To return to an earlier but nonetheless useful terminology, it will be shown here how the Western “capitalist mode of production” was fed by the African “slave mode of production” over the course of the nineteenth century, and, conversely, how the destruction of Atlantic slavery stimulated the growth of slavery in Africa. This connection varied according to time and place, first because of the growth of the Atlantic slave trade between 1780 and 1830, then because of the progressive disappearance of this trade after the 1850s. After explaining what we mean by the “slave mode of production” in Africa, we analyze the forms taken by the interdependence of this mode and Western capitalism in different parts of Africa. West Africa suffered the full force of the interdiction of the Atlantic slave trade, which compelled it to reenter the capitalist world through the growth of an internal slavery of “production.” East Africa, in contrast, intensified its involvement in the slave trade thanks to Western industrialization, which nourished it through the massive introduction of armaments whose sale was forbidden in the Atlantic. In the two cases, the result was an intensification of the African “slave mode of production” that was inseparable from Western capitalism.

The Affirmation of the “Slave Mode of Production” in Africa during the Nineteenth Century

During the nineteenth century, the economic transformations were as fundamental in Africa as they were in America. From the last third of the eighteenth century the production of slaves in Africa assumed literally industrial proportions because, with the Industrial Revolution, what Dale Tomich has termed “the second slavery” emerged (2017). Plantation slavery producing, above all, sugar and secondarily tobacco had dominated the preindustrial mercantilist epoch. Through the first third of the nineteenth century American plantations, with cotton in the lead, were integrated into the emergent Western capitalist system. The production of cotton, the premier raw material of the British textile industry, as well as sugar and coffee would depend on slave plantations in the United States (until 1863), Cuba (until 1880), and Brazil (until 1888). Britain accorded these plantation zones the privilege of prolonging the slave trade south of the equator (that is, with Angola and Mozambique) until the middle of the century.

Since the eighteenth century the tracks of both the internal and the external slave trade crisscrossed the African continent. The internal trade was accentuated as the legal Atlantic slave trade was progressively closed. At the same time, Europeans demanded growing quantities of raw materials from Africa for their infant industries. The economy of tropical Africa was transformed by the new demands of the Western Industrial Revolution. In West Africa palm oil (from 1802) and peanut oil (from the 1830s–1840s), tropical oil-producing plants that were lacking in temperate countries, were indispensable for lubricating machines, providing illumination before electricity, and providing the raw material for the new soap industry. In Zanzibar it was cloves, which employed one hundred thousand slaves in 1830. In the rain forest it was red and yellow dyewoods, which were required by the British textile industry because the chemical industry was not yet able to produce synthetic dyes. The demand for ivory increased exponentially (piano keys, etc.), while at the end of the century natural rubber was required for the fabrication of automobile tires before the rubber plantations of the twentieth century. The use of a servile African labor force was generalized in order to export all these products. To put it another way, the development of the capitalist economy in the West did not reject slave labor at all. On the contrary, in America as well as in Africa, the industrial economy profited from it.

African societies had known slavery for a very long time, and, contrary to what some anthropologists dreamed only a short while ago, slavery in Africa was not necessarily more “mild” or more “domestic” than elsewhere. But what is certain is that the demand from buyers from outside the continent brought about the formation and rapid expansion of intensive internal networks. Beginning in the eighteenth century, there were numerous chiefs on the coast and in the interior who became great slave traders, and more and more organized supply networks reached into the heart of the continent. The internal use of slaves was amplified at the same time, especially when the progressive closing of the Atlantic market increased the number of captives available. African sovereigns looked more and more to utilize in place the servile labor force that had become unsalable across the seas. The situation in Africa fit international conditions well. The Industrial Revolution centered in Britain changed conditions at the same time. Claude Meillassoux has thus demonstrated that a “slave mode of production” was veritably in place in Africa during the nineteenth century (1991; Lovejoy 1983). The first evaluations of the early French colonizers at the end of the nineteenth century estimated that perhaps one-half of the population had servile status, a much higher percentage than what it had been a century earlier (Klein 1998). At the same time, the utilization of slave soldiers increased. The conquering powers of the West African jihads (Ousman dan Fodio, El Hadj Omar, Samori, etc.) largely used these slaves to reinforce their production and their armies. And here is the extreme paradox: at the end of the nineteenth century, Western colonizers justified the conquest by the need to struggle against the internal African slavery that they themselves had stimulated.

The Expansion of Internal Slavery in West Africa:
The Different Spaces

Despite British efforts, nearly 1.3 million slaves embarked from West Africa destined for the Americas in the first part of the nineteenth century. Three-fourths of them originated in the Bights of Benin and Biafra, and they still came from the Senegambian coast and the Volta River. The slave trade and slavery continued to be very closely tied together. Nevertheless, the growing difficulties of the Atlantic trade led local sovereigns to promote the export of “legitimate” products such as gum, palm oil, peanuts, and so on, to intensify other activities such as gold mining, or to create networks that went in new directions such as the redistribution of kola nuts by the Asante in the Sudanese zone where massive conversions to Islam increased demand. Alongside long-standing demand for slaves (as soldiers, personal retainers of chiefs, or wives), this reorientation of production and porterage made the demand for slaves explode, and in turn, the growing number of slaves encouraged the reorganization of economy and society.

In Senegambia or among the Fulbe in Fuuta Jalon servile labor already existed, but more than ever it became the major mode of exploitation. Even where British antislavery pressure was strongest, as in Sierra Leone where thousands of “liberated” Africans flowed over the course of the century, internal local slavery was forbidden only in 1928. The commerce stimulated by European presence multiplied the exchanges of salt, rice, and imported manufactured goods for vegetable oils and food products from the backcountry. By the end of the century, it is estimated that half of the Mende population were in servile status (Lovejoy 1983). Internal slavery developed even more when there was no longer an overseas market. The beneficiaries were the coastal states and the urban Muslim aristocracies of the Sahel. For example, the great Hausa city of Kano in the interior established a cottage industry producing cotton cloth whose main labor force was exclusively servile (Frishman 1977). The Kano manufacturers, along with secondary textile centers, supplied the whole of the West African market before British colonization substituted cotton goods imported from England in the twentieth century.

The regions producing agricultural products for export were also quick to adopt a “slave mode of production,” especially when the political structure and the organization of landed property lent themselves to production on a grand scale. This was the case regarding the Kingdom of Dahomey, with Abomey as its capital, and the city-states of the Nigerian coast, which produced palm oil, and the Empire of Asante, which produced gold and kola nuts (Wilks 1975). The adjustment was not always easy. Initially, following British abolition of the slave trade, the price of slaves in the trade fell drastically and momentarily affected the lifestyle of the elite merchants on the coast. But prices soon returned to normal (because of the risks of the contraband trade) and the level of the trade recovered in the Bight of Biafra. The regions also adapted readily to the substitution of “legitimate” products (above all vegetable oils). King Ghezo of Dahomey was able to take advantage of the new situation by simultaneously playing off the interests of Régis, a Marseilles merchant who wanted to trade in both slaves and oil (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1971). As for the Asante Kingdom, it found new resources after a brief conjunctural crisis thanks to its position between the coast and the Sokoto Caliphate, the great consumer of its kola nuts (Lovejoy 1980; Terray 1994).

Obviously, the coastal forts such as Cape Coast, Elmina, and Accra on the Gold Coast experienced a period of crisis at the beginning of the century, and the coastal Fante were its first victims. Yet the change did not affect everyone. Until the 1840s the Danes continued to trade slaves as usual in the southwest of the Gold Coast in order to support their slave plantations, which produced more food for local consumption than export products (Kea and Law 1995). Moreover, the Fante, like the Asante, did not lack resources that could be substituted for slaves, in particular gold as well as kola nuts. The Asante of the interior gradually converted the annual raids by means of which they obtained slaves to exchange for guns and powder. At first, large numbers of captives were taken to the capital of Kumasi and its environs, and, with no one knowing what to do with them, many were executed. As in the Kingdom of Dahomey, human ritual sacrifices were celebrated each year and on an even grander scale on the occasion of royal funerals (Terray 1994). But soon the king and the provincial chiefs employed the slaves in harvesting nuts or mining gold. In the 1870s it is estimated that half of the Asante population lived in servile status. The kings of Abomey and Porto Novo did the same by encouraging the exploitation of natural palm groves that formed the wealth of their kingdoms. The Afro-Brazilians of the coast, former slaves returned from Brazil and slave traders themselves, imitated them as did the principal local dignitaries. Around 1860 Quenum, son of a great merchant from Abomey, had thousands of slaves, as did the “Brazilian” Domingo Martinez. On the vast plantations clusters of slaves guaranteed palm nut production and porterage for “legitimate” commerce. In the capitals (Porto Novo, Kumasi, and Abomey where in 1851 a third of the thirty thousand inhabitants were slaves) or the great centers of kola trade such as Salaga, Bondoukou, or Bouna, slaves performed all of the necessary labor: supplying wood and water and food supplies for the merchants and caravans leaving from the great plantations surrounding the towns, each of which had several hundred slaves who were often grouped in villages of farmers or artisans.

Even in those scattered societies where there was no power beyond that of the village chief, such as those societies inhabiting the lagoons in Ivory Coast (Memel-Fote 2007), slavery existed and became more and more extensive. There were hardly any free peasants who did not possess at least one or two slaves, not to mention the frequent phenomenon of young people held in pawn for payment of a debt or the atonement of an offense (Lovejoy and Falola 1994). Local slavery seems to have been least common in the regions that were the most subject to slave raiding, such as the Mossi countries or Gourounsi (present-day Burkina-Faso). These regions served as the reservoirs for the trade of others.

In Igbo country, where palm oil was produced on village scale, a class of notables established their wealth through control of lineage lands, the importance of their commercial affairs, and the number of their clients and slaves. The firms that traded on the river employed hundreds of slaves who were organized in a paramilitary manner. A slave master who possessed two hundred slaves for the production of oil and yams was recorded there in 1841 (cited by Ohadike 1994, 186). The process of enslavement only grew. Merchant cities like Onitsha or the ports of the Niger Delta such as Bonny or Opobo ended up holding thousands of slaves as porters or boatmen. In about 1880 a merchant from Calabar possessed about three thousand, the majority divided among his three plantations.

The same phenomenon occurred in the great Yoruba city-states (Ibadan, Ijebu, Abeokuta, Lagos) as a result of the incessant wars of the nineteenth century (Hopkins 1968). Freemen did not constitute more than a minority of the population. Whether animist, Muslim, or Christian, both war chiefs and large merchants, the latter including a few women, amassed hundreds if not thousands of slaves who served them as workers or soldiers. Thus, in 1859 Chief Kurumi of Ijaye had three hundred women and an army of a thousand slaves, not counting all those who worked on his plantations. Because of insecurity, it was necessary for the armies, largely constituted by slaves, to be fed by other hordes of slaves. Besides Lagos before English occupation (1851), Ibadan was the most deeply implicated in slavery. Several thousand slaves passed through each year. The majority of them were Muslims, most of whom spoke Hausa. Those suitable for local employment were sold. Women were placed in harems; the more fit served as soldiers. Others were used as artisans or as porters. The great majority of these slaves were sent to the fields where they worked under the supervision of overseers who were slaves themselves. There they risked being captured again at the least disturbance. Between 1860 and 1870 some one hundred families alone possessed more than fifty thousand slaves. Madame Efustan had two thousand on her lands without counting those she kept in town (Lovejoy 1983, 173–75). But in contrast to Asante where the matrilineal system meant that the children of a slave woman remained slaves, the patrilineal system of Dahomey or Yoruba country made the assimilation of the second generation much easier because the child of a slave wife enjoyed the status of its father.

The Transfer of the Atlantic Slave Trade toward the Indian Ocean

The rise of the Atlantic slave trade and then its decline beginning in the 1840s, at the time of the first Industrial Revolution, had an analogous effect for opposite reasons in Africa—that of increasing the internal slave trade. With the rise of the Atlantic trade the demand for slaves in intertropical Africa increased exponentially, while with its decline slaves already accumulated who could no longer find purchasers elsewhere were deployed in place as instruments of production and as soldiers.

This turning point is apparent in East Africa. The trade toward the Indian Ocean was active, but for a long time it was less intense than that of the west because Arab-Muslim demand was not based on plantation agriculture. A reason for that is undoubtedly the memorable and massive slave revolt that lasted for thirty years in Mesopotamia during the ninth century and provoked the massacre of five hundred thousand to a million primarily Zanj (black) slaves (Popović 2011). The lesson of the dangers of such concentrations of an enslaved labor force demonstrated by that revolt lasted for a long time.

All that changed with the Industrial Revolution, which reintegrated the Sultanate of Zanzibar into the world-economy. Clove trees were introduced as contraband to Zanzibar in 1820. The plants began to yield fruit in 1828 when the sultan of Oman, the ruler of Zanzibar, passed through the island. While there, the sultan met an American businessman from Boston who convinced him that it was in his interest to break the Dutch monopoly on this rare and expensive spice. The American returned in 1833 with a contract that the sultan signed. He became the American commercial consul and clove fever seized the island. Along with the neighboring island of Pemba, it quickly became the world’s leading exporter of cloves. The majority of plantations were of medium size with fifty to a hundred slaves. The Americans offered in exchange pearls, copper and iron coins, and coarse cotton cloth that caused a sensation and spread rapidly in the backward country. Called merikani because of its origin and often dyed black because it showed less dirt, it is still very much in demand though it is no longer produced in the United States. The paradox was that the consul, representing an antislavery state (Massachusetts) and pleading for the end of the slave trade before the sultan, encouraged cotton production by the slaves in the Southern United States, whose labor supplied the textile mills of Massachusetts (Cheriff 1987).

In 1840 the wealth of Zanzibar, which rested on both the slave trade and the plantations, led the sultan of Oman to transfer his capital there. At the same time, Arab a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Atlantic/Africa
• 1 African Slavery in the Nineteenth Century: Inseparable Partner of the Atlantic Slave Trade
• 2 The Great Transformation: World Capitalism and the Crisis of Slavery in the Americas
• 3 The Jihad Movement and the Development of “Second Slavery” in West Africa in the Nineteenth Century
• 4 The Atlantic and Atlantic Slavery, Second Slavery, the Hidden Atlantic, and Capitalism
• 5 The Commodification of Freedom in Cuba during Second Slavery
• 6 Atlantic Slavery, African Landscapes: Change and Transformation in the Era of the Atlantic World
• 7 The Cultivation System in Java, Second Slavery in Brazil, and the World Coffee Economy (ca. 1760–1860)
• 8 African Businesswomen in the Age of Second Slavery in Angola
• 9 The “Second Slavery” in Africa: Migration and Political Economy in the Nineteenth Century
• 10 African Enslavement and the East India Articles: Two Captive-Labor Regimes in the Western Indian Ocean ca. 1750–1900
• 11 Dutch Capitalism and Slavery in the Longer Run: A Reorientation
• 12 Merchant Capital and Slave Trading in the Western Indian Ocean, 1770–1830
• 13 Coerced Labor in Cameroon and Industrial Progress in Wilhelmine Germany, 1884–1914
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover