The slave trade
and the Atlantic economies J451-187075Were I to characterize the Dutch as I by experience have found them to be, I should
give the same character of them, as I have herein given of the Natives of this country,
for I have often seriously considered with myself whether they or the Natives here
were of the most villanous, falsest temper and could never come to a resolution
thereon.^65
No doubt the Dutch and the Africans had much the same thing to say about
the British.
What is more, the wars and raids of the slave trade encouraged the
location of settlements
in good defensive positions and their location in relation to natural obstacles makes
settlements inaccessible at the cost of ease of communications or even good building
sites [and good agricultural land].^68
This encouraged subsistence and discouraged market activities. But what is
more serious, by hiding away from slave gatherers these settlements were also
hiding away from the flow of modernizing ideas.
Thus, it is hard to exaggerate the consequences of the chaotic conditions
created by the slave trade for African economic development. For Central
and Eastern Africa, in particular, it has been shown that 'the pre-colonial
economic tragedy' consists of the 'dissipation and disruption' of industrial
and specialized skills developed in pre-slave-trade days, 'under the impact of
violence and the slave trade'.^67
Not only did the external slave trade retard the development of African
economies through its demographic and disruptive effects, but it also prevented
the growth of a 'normal' international trade between Africa and the rest of the
world at a time when such trade was acting as a powerful engine of economic
development in a number of territories. The loss to Africa of the developmental
effects of this type of international trade represents one of the most important
opportunity costs of the slave trade for African economies.
There is evidence to show that opportunities for the development of
international trade in commodities capable of being produced in Africa did
exist and that the foreign merchants who came to Africa in the period 1451—
1870, were aware of those opportunities, and there is proof that the operation
of the slave trade prevented in various ways the development of such a trade.
In the trans-Saharan sector of African international trade, transport
costs prevented the development of trade in commodities with low value-to-
weight ratio. In fact, it is possible that the problem of finding suitable commodi-
ties with which to pay for goods coming across the Sahara may have compelled
people in the western Sudan to look for slaves as the preferred commodity.
It was in the Atlantic that the first opportunity appeared to develop inter-
national trade with Africa in bulky goods.