Summary report of the meeting of experts
on the African slave trade219development in Africa with that of the development of Europe in a single
overall perspective. The meeting expressed a strong hope that European his-
torians would co-operate in the research that would have to be undertaken
along these new main lines of historical reasoning.
In the area of generalities a place apart has to be given to the Muslin
countries of Africa, Arabia, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. It is
difficult to assess the role played in enriching this part of the world by the
Africans present from the seventh century in Iraq, who specialized in the diffi-
cult processes of cultivating dates and sugar cane, and of pearl fishing. How
can an accurate assessment be made of the contribution of black soldiers and
African sailors to the power of the Muslim world?
It is only in the nineteenth century that the Muslim slave trade, linked to
the labour needs of the Indian Ocean colonies, may be regarded as being inte-
grated in the capitalist system. Thus, for the earlier periods, other approaches
and other scales of assessment are needed than for European capitalism.
How can an equitable assessment be made of the contribution of black
Africans imported into Europe, first through the Muslim countries up to the
fifteenth century, and then directly?
The meeting voiced concern that these phenomena, which are so complex
and so full of contradictions, should always be studied in a historical perspec-
tive, that is to say as an evolving phenomenon, with chronological references.
The colonizing countries benefited in disparate ways from the conse-
quences of the slave trade.
The countries of the western Mediterranean, which were the richest in capital
before the fifteenth century, slowly lost their predominant position from
then on to the Atlantic European countries.
Portugal was late in taking the path of modern capitalist economic development,
because of the lack of a well-to-do middle class. Brazil benefited more
from the slave trade than the mother country. In Brazil, the massive
influx of labour from Africa, regarded by the Portuguese simply as a
manpower reservoir, made possible the development of the mines and
also the plantations, both of which, in the eighteenth century, produced
commodities for which there was a large-scale international market.
Portugal invested in Brazil alone, and hardly invested at all in Africa
before 1930.
Spain was not able to take any better advantage, through development of an
entrepreneurial middle class, of the profits made possible by the slave
trade. It was unable to keep the monopoly of the slave trade and did not
develop any major trade in the produce of the plantations. Its colonies,
therefore, did not share in the rapid development of the colonies of its
European rivals in the eighteenth century. The importation of manpower
was not as necessary in those colonies as elsewhere, and labour was