66 Joseph E. Inikori
based northern farms.^30 When this superior efficiency of slave labour over free
labour is added to the very much higher labour costs that would have prevailed
in the absence of slave labour, it can be easily seen why production costs, even
in the areas where it was possible to obtain some additional wage or indentured
labour at a high price, would have been terribly high in the absence of slave
labour. As Ralph Davis has shown, the phenomenal expansion of European
consumption of products imported from the Americas depended largely on
the very low levels to which their prices dropped in the course of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.^81 European demand for products from the Americas
was therefore highly price elastic, so that a manifold increase in the prices of
those products in the absence of slave labour would have greatly reduced their
consumption in Europe and therefore the volume of trade based on them.
Hence, taking into account the large areas in the Americas where no production
at all would have taken place without slave labour, and the greatly reduced level
of production and sale in areas where some wage or indentured labour would
have been forthcoming at a high price, the conclusion can be drawn that the
growth of world trade between 1500 and 1870 was due very largely to the avail-
ability of African slave labour supplied through the slave trade. It is important
to stress that even the growth of trade between West European countries at
this time depended greatly on the re-export of American products from one
European country to another, and the export of European goods from one
European country to another for onward trans-shipment to the Americas.
Before these developments, autarchic practices by various West European
nations in their efforts to encourage home industries militated against the
growth of intra-European trade.^32 Even the greatly enlarged trade with the
East Indies during this period still depended largely on the Atlantic system,
for a large proportion of the oriental goods was re-exported to Africa and the
Americas.
Economic consequences of the external slave trade from AfricaThis question has just begun to receive the attention of scholars.^33 One recent
attempt in this field is based on a static model derived from the classical theory
of international trade. The costs and benefits of the slave trade for
Africa were computed on the basis of the difference between as estimated total
amount of goods that would have been produced (at the subsistence level of
production) in Africa by the estimated number of all slaves that were exported
and the total value of import goods received in exchange for the slaves. If the
former exceeds the latter than the material welfare of Africans deteriorated as
a result of the slave trade; but if the latter exceeds the former, then the material
welfare of Africans improved as a result of the slave trade.^34 Apart from the
conceptual weaknesses of this model, it has no power to determine the dynamic