80 Joseph E. Inikoriexploitation of American resources, and that the development and growth of
West European and North American economies during this period were
greatly influenced by the expanded world trade. This leads to the inference
that the slave trade was a critical factor in the development of West European
and North American economies in the period of this study. The benefits of the
Atlantic system to Latin America and the West Indies generally were minimal,
due to the type of economic functions performed, the large amount of 'foreign
factors of production ' employed and some other reasons. But, the clear losers
in the growth of the Atlantic system, and woefully so, were the African econ-
omies. The demographic and disruptive effects of a trade which required the
forceful capture and sale of human beings retarded the development of market
activities and the evolution of institutional arrangements essential for the
growth of capitalism. What is more, the operation of the slave trade prevented
in various ways the growth of a 'normal' international trade between Africa
and the rest of the world. From the evidence presented above, it is clear that,
without the supply of African slave labour to the Americas, European mer-
chants and governments would have been compelled by purely economic
considerations to encourage the production of a wide range of commodities,
including some of the American commodities, in Africa. This would have
meant that the growth of world trade in the period under review would have
been very much slower, and hence the rate of development in Western Europe
and North America. But the History of Africa would have been entirely dif-
ferent. The level of economic and social development would not have been
the same in all the regions of Africa, south of the Sahara. But all of them would
have been far richer, the regions poorly endowed with resources benefiting
from the development of the better endowed ones through trade and other
contacts. In the final analysis, it can be said that the Atlantic economies that
developed between 1451 and 1870, did so at the expense of the African
economies.
Notes- I am grateful to Professor Michael Crowder of the Centre for Cultural Studies,
University of Lagos, Professor R. J. Gavin of the Department of History, Ahmadu
Bello University, Zaria, and Dr E. J. Usoro of the Department of Economics,
University of Ibadan, for reading through the first draft of this paper and making
helpful criticisms and suggestions. They are, however, not responsible for any
errors there may be in the paper. - It is not easy to assess the contribution of slavery to the Middle East economies.
- A great deal of the literature centres round Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery. A
Seminar held at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, on 4-5 June
1965, dealt with the issues of abolition raised by Eric Williams. The proceedings of
the seminar have appeared under the title The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade from
West Africa, University of Edinburgh, Centre of African Studies, 1965. Some of