Summary report of the meeting of experts
on the African slave trade215ever more scanty the further back one goes in history. The state of knowledge
is relatively good concerning the routes used in transporting the slaves and
the ports of embarkation, but study of the economic and political impact of
the slave trade is much less advanced. It is difficult to break down such work
into component parts and dissociate the quantitative elements from the quali-
tative, the economic from the political.
Demographic repercussions in AfricaIt was clear that no one now supports the idea that the slave trade played a
positive role by averting a population explosion in Africa, but there are con-
siderable differences of opinion concerning the responsibility of the slave trade
for the underdevelopment of the African continent. Investigation of this subject
is difficult, because the usual tools for analysis are non-existent.
The meeting recommended that for such studies resort should be had to
the techniques of demographers, which would provide indications as to the
minimum population density of a particular area capable of ensuring the
survival of its inhabitants and as to the optimum population density range
within which the best conditions for development were to be found.
Likewise, the study of works on environmental effects in Africa (for
example on the tsetse fly or onchocerciasis) could provide interesting evidence
as to the secondary causes of depopulation or population movements.
The use of global economic analysis techniques should make it possible
to obtain a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the negative influence of
the slave trade on African productivity. The preparation of monographs for
area of Africa would be useful in obtaining a complete picture of the effects
of the slave trade.
Impact of the slave trade on political, economic and social
structures in AfricaNone of the experts present disputed the idea that the slave trade was respon-
sible for the economic backwardness of Black Africa. Some experts discussed
the positive role that might have been played as producers and consumers
by the Africans removed from the continent if they had not been transported
as slaves away from Africa.
It was found that the external demand for labour became increasingly
pressing with time and that in the overall study of the slave trade chronological
sequences must be preserved. The demand by the Muslim labour markets
was followed, after the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, by that arising from
the first European experiments with plantations. Then, as the major phenomena
of the plantation economy and mining developed in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries in the Americas and later in the Indian Ocean, the slave