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58 Joseph E. Inikori

Gulf, India and the islands on the Indian Ocean, no aggregate estimates of the

total numbers involved have been made, From the information available,* we

may not be exaggerating if we put the total figures for the whole of our period

at some 2 million.

Thus, the external slave trade from Africa south of the Sahara between

the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved the export of not less than

19 million people.

The slave trade and the expansion of international trade

The buying, shipping and employment of over 11 million slaves in capitalistic
production for an international market on the one hand, and the shipping and
marketing of the commodities produced by those slaves on the other, consti-
tuted a very large part, in volume, of all international economic transactions
in the period 1451-1870. In order to relate this international transaction of
immense proportions to Western development, we shall try to answer the
following questions which in some ways are related:
To what extent did the requirements for buying and transporting over 11 million
slaves contribute towards development in Western economies?
Was the process of economic development in Atlantic Europe and the Americas
critically influenced by the growth of world trade between 1500 and
1870?
To what extent did the expansion of international trade between 1500 and
1870 depend on the slave trade?
Before answering these questions, something must be said about the
division of functions in the Atlantic system within which the slave trade and
slavery operated. The main functional categories in that system were: trade
and finance; transportation; manufacturing; mining; export staple agriculture
in plantations; commercial foodstuff agriculture in medium-sized freehold
farms; and the sale of labour. Western Europe overwhelmingly dominated
trade, finance, transportation and manufacturing. Portuguese and Spanish
America also did some trading and transportation, including some manufac-
turing for internal consumption. But their main function in the Atlantic system
was the mining of precious metals and export staple agriculture in plantations.
The middle and north-eastern states of North America, right from the colonial
days, concentrated on commercial foodstuff production for export to the slave
plantations of the West Indian islands, import and export trade, shipping,
finance, shipbuilding, lumber production, fishing and, later, manufacturing.
The southern states specialized in plantation agriculture, first, mainly tobacco,
but later, mainly cotton. The special function of all the West Indian islands
was plantation agriculture—coffee, cotton, indigo, but in particular, sugar
cane. Africa did not perform any real production function in the Atlantic