THE MASSIVE SHIFT TO CAPTIVE EXPORT

Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, the growth in demand for slave labor in the Americas, associated with the rapid expansion of large-scale mining and plantation agriculture (at a time when the pre-Columbian indigenous population of the Americas had been largely destroyed), shifted European traders’ demand decisively from African products to African captives. Whereas the demand for products created conditions that favored individuals with the talent and aptitude to organize the production and distribution of goods and services, the demand for captives favored individuals with violent dispositions. As these individuals engaged in rampant kidnapping within their own communities and organized raids across political boundaries to obtain captives, the politically fragmented societies were unable to prevent an internal breakdown of law and order and keep external raiders at bay. Thus, indiscriminate kidnapping created prolonged internal social conflicts, while raids across political borders provoked political conflicts between neighbors, which led to protracted wars. All of this made captives available for sale to the European exporters.

Some people in the fragmented societies adopted various defensive measures, the most successful of which was migration to sites with natural defenses (hilltops in particular). But their success was limited, and the bulk of the captives exported ultimately came from politically fragmented societies. Only when political and economic entrepreneurs succeeded in establishing relatively strong centralized states and incorporated the weakly organized societies were the people adequately protected against capture and sale for export. When this occurred, the frontier of capture and sale was pushed outward to other weakly organized societies. Yet while the newly constituted and relatively strong centralized states protected their citizens from capture and export, they continued to export captives from outside their political boundaries as a way of securing the resources needed to maintain stability at home and protect their territorial integrity.

It is clear from the evidence that political fragmentation in Atlantic Africa was the permissive factor that allowed a sustained response to the growing demand for slave labor in the Americas. What western Africa shared with the European societies that supplied captives exported to the Middle East was not some peculiar economy in which dependents were accumulated as a form of wealth. Nor was it some special cultural element that permitted the massive export of people. Instead, the common condition was political fragmentation. Both in Europe and in western Africa, the eventual incorporation of fragmented societies into relatively strong centralized states protected the citizens against capture and sale. The main difference, however, was the much greater magnitude of the transatlantic demand, which fed a slave system aimed at the production of commodities for an evolving capitalist world market. The magnitude of the demand created conditions that slowed the generalized development of strong states in all of sub-Saharan Africa, which would likely have ended the trade as it did in Europe.

A comparative discussion of the rise and demise of captive export from Europe and the rise of transatlantic slaving from western Africa also helps to explain why the demand for slave labor in the Americas focused on western Africa instead of Europe. Some historians have offered an ideological explanation for this. By the sixteenth century, they say, Europeans in Europe and the Americas were unwilling to enslave other Europeans, but they had no racial constraint enslaving Africans (Eltis 2000). This explanation is unsatisfactory, however. There was no pan-European identity in the sixteenth century that could ideologically prevent the enslavement of Europeans by other Europeans, just as there was no pan-African identity to ideologically prevent rulers in Africa from exporting people outside their polities. These identities were nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments. As has been seen, it was not the collective action of Europeans that ended the export of captives from Europe. Individual states in Europe ended the export of their citizens for domestic political reasons, the same way that individual states in western Africa ended the export of their citizens. Anti-African European racism grew out of the racialization of slavery in the Americas; it was not the cause of the transatlantic slave trade.