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(^78) Joseph E. Inikori
of the American resources was making a very heavy demand on the same pro-
duction factors that were needed for the development of African resources.
But as long as African slave labour was available, production factors from
Europe could be more profitably employed in the exploitation of American
resources than in the development of trade in the products of the African soil.
This was so because the employment of African slaves by European
planters to produce tropical products in Africa on the scale that prevailed in
the Americas would have been very costly in terms of resistance by African
governments, the ease with which the slaves employed in Africa could escape
from their white masters (possibly with the connivance of African governments),
and, most seriously, in terms of mortality among whites in Africa at a time
when tropical medicine was unknown to Europeans. The most likely method
would have been through co-operation between the European merchants and
African rulers to encourage African peoples to cultivate the crops in demand,
as was done in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But this method
would definitely have been slow in producing a trade on the scale then pre-
vailing in commodities being produced in the Americas with African slave
labour.
In this circumstance, so long as African slave labour was available, the
Americas remained far more attractive to European production factors. The
buying and shipping of the slaves to the Americas, the exploitation of the
American resources, and the shipping and marketing of the American com-
modities internationally, absorbed so many production factors from Europe
and Africa that little or nothing was left for the development of trade in the
products of the African soil. That development was further hampered by the
unsettled conditions which attended the acquisition of captives for sale as
slaves.
But the important point is that the advantages of the Americas depended
very largely on African slave labour. If there had been no slave trade from Africa
to the Americas, the advantage would have been on the side of encouraging
Africans to produce a wide range of commodities in Africa for an international
market. From the evidence before us, it is clear that this is what would have
happened. But the conditions which prevailed under the slave trade made that
trade more profitable both to a majority of the European merchants and to
the African rulers and entrepreneurs whose talents would have been required
for the production and marketing of these commodities in Africa. Conse-
quently, African products imported into Europe during the slave-trade period
remained those which required very little entrepreneurship and little or no
capital investment to produce—ivory, gum, palm oil, redwood, etc.—being
all commodities that were either hunted or gathered from wild trees.
Some European governments fully realized that the development of
international trade in the products of the African soil would mean a mass