218 Summary report of the meeting of experts
on the African slave trade
century bore any resemblance to those which had existed at the begin-
ning of the slave trade.
The question arises who best protected those dependent on them and to the
detriment of whom, in this redistribution of political factors.
In any event, it seems indisputable that such upsets were accompanied
by an increase of social tensions, a worsening of servitude, especially quanti-
tatively and by a transformation of the former processes of social integration
that the various forms of personal dependence provided in African society
prior to the fifteenth century.
As an extreme case, it must be recalled that, at least in East Africa, and
no doubt elsewhere, rulers founded their power and wealth in the nineteenth
century on the systematic exploitation of the sale of slaves destined for the
Indian Ocean ports or for plantations which were by that time established on
the soil of Africa itself.Economic consequences in the countries benefiting from the slave tradeIt was considered that, from the outset, a distinction must be made between
the receiving countries and the colonial powers which certainly derived the
greatest advantage from the slave trade. The latter controlled the competitive
process carried on under cover of the monopoly system and dominated capi-
talist growth from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. They benefited twice
from the export of African slaves, first through the transportation of slaves
and secondly by the production of marketable commodities made possible by
the local use of slave labour. The receiving countries benefited much less
uniformly from the arrival of their labour force; to a large extent this lack of
uniformity is due to the degree of power of the colonists, which varied over
the years, and to the varying degree of their participation in competitive trade.^4
A careful distinction should probably be made between State profits,
made mainly out of the slave trade in certain cases and out of the power
provided by the marketing of colonial produce in other cases, and private
profits, of a more modern kind, made for example in Great Britain and in the
United Provinces.
This is a very complex question. First, because it is linked with the
development of Western capitalist economy over three or four centuries and
because it is difficult to identify quantitatively the proportion of the means of
capital accumulation derived from the slave trade. Secondly, because the very
question of the role played by the slave trade in this development of pre-
industrial and industrial capitalist Europe is in itself a novelty, at any rate
for some European scholars. Similarly, methodological changes and perhaps
even changes of attitude are required to link the analyses of the economic