Gabriel Lambert Global and Imperial History

When, how and why did Africa become part of the emerging world
economy in the 18th and 19th centuries? Answer with special reference to
West Africa

In 1441 Antam Gonçlavez, a young Portuguese sea-captain kidnapped a man and

a women from the Western Saharan coast and presented them to Prince Henry
the Navigator.1 By 1445 there was a Portuguese fort on Arguin Island off the
Mauritanian coast, tasked with purchasing both gold and slaves. This represents
the starting point from which Africa and especially West Africa began to play an
increasingly important part in Europe’s economy. After the peak of the slave
trade in the late 18th century and by its eventual decline in the latter 19th many
regions were engaging in ‘legitimate’ trade with Europe, a process of integration
that continued after partition. Yet does this process represent incorporation into
a ‘world’ economy or exploitation and even retardation by the European powers?
Is it fair to call a region that has tailored its economy to fit into a niche European
import Markey integrated if it relied totally on European shipping and traders
for its business? Can dependency on the European market be equated with
assimilation with the ‘world’ economy? When investigating the three broad
phases of development, namely the slave trade, the conversion to ‘legitimate’
commerce and the period of colonial partition, it is essential to maintain an
African perspective free from Euro-centrism that bears such questions in mind.

Why was Africa’s contact between the 15th and 19th centuries characterised by
the slave trade? Part of the reason rests in under population due to the paucity of
much African soil for settled agriculture (at least until the arrival of high-yielding
drought-resistant maize and cassava). Slavery was a mechanism within Africa for
controlling an otherwise unmanageably dispersed population – by 1800 there
were still very few towns over 10,000 people with the notable exception of the
Ethiopian capital Gondar.2 Supplying European traders on the West Coast was
therefore an enlargement of a practice already common in the region 3 – the
Moors who supplied Arguin Island with slaves had been doing so before the
Portuguese arrival. As the Futa Jallon, the Ashanti, the Dahomy and the Yoruba

1
Iliffe p127
2
Munro p21
3
Iliffe, p129
Gabriel Lambert Global and Imperial History

embarked on their military campaigns to capture slaves to feed the European

market, the internal African trade continued, long after its abolition in 1807 by
the British Parliament.4 The relative lack of settled communities also explains
why African states and communities did not possess the maritime technology
capable of launching their own inter-continental trade and why they could not,
without slaves, maintain a trade equilibrium with Europe. Atlantic sugar,
tobacco, coffee, cocoa and cotton was grown on abundant land that was easier to
access, less perilous in terms of tropical disease and offered a degree of
specialization that most African states could not match. 5 It was easier to
purchase slaves and ship them to the Americas and the Caribbean than it was to
trade in commodities directly with Africa, especially since African slaves were
more resistant to tropical disease than Europeans (many profitable crops such as
cocoa arrived only as a result of European trade). Thus a combination of African
settlement patterns and European demand for labour to grow tropical products
shaped Africa’s first encounters with the world economy.

What was the impact of this involvement? In terms of the amount of trade that
flowed from and too Africa, very little – in the 1780s, the peak of the slave trade,
West African overseas trade was only £0.10 per capita per year compared to
£5.70 per capita in the British West Indies.6 Moreover, the imports that European
states used to trade for slaves (principally cloth and firearms) only impacted
upon coastal areas such as Angola and along the River Senegal that cam into
direct contact with the trade. Igbo textiles grew in line with an expanding West
African demand that could absorb both foreign and domestic cloth. 7 The
structure of African production barely changed and, most importantly, the
transport links between African regions remains poor enough to confine all
European impact to the coastal regions and the vast majority of trade continued
to be internal rather than external. This strongly suggests a lack of thorough
market integration. However, the length of contact with Europeans on the west
coast enlarged the local sphere of market operations and fostered commercial

4
Munro, p37
5
ibid, p33
6
Iliffe, p145
7
ibid, p146
Gabriel Lambert Global and Imperial History

skills and confidence in European trade. This experience of this trade became
vital in the West African shift to ‘legitimate’ trade.

The slave trade did not end in 1807. Indeed the profitability of slaving increased
as the price of slaves declined by 60% between 1780 and 1860 giving average
profits of 90% in sugar-producing Cuba in the mid 19th century compared to
only 10% a century before.8 However, in West Africa where British and French
naval patrols were at their most aggressive, fundamental shifts in trade did
occur. A good deal of the stimulus for this African economic shift up to the 1880s
lay in the industrial revolution – the mechanization of the textile industry
brought down the price of British cloth by 75% between 1817 and 1850
enabling petty traders and ordinary farmers in Africa to be able to afford them
for the first time.9 A traveller in southern Yorubaland in 1862 saw 1305 people in
his journey between Oside and Abeokuta and 1100 of these were dressed
entirely in European cloth.10 In the 19th century Igbo textile production was
detrimentally effected by European competition as European cotton flooded the
market with imports increasing by a factor of 50, demonstrating a certain degree
of integration between European and African markets.

It was not just the declining price of European goods that shaped the African
economy up to partition – the demand for primary products (both raw materials
and foodstuffs) was also increasing with industrialization. For instance, the
growing demand for palm oil (used in soap production and as an industrial
lubricant) with prices doubling between 1830 and 1850 prompted the export of
palm oil to increase by a factor of six in West Africa in the same period,
overtaking slaves in the 1830s.11 Demand for vegetable oils increased too,
encouraging Senegal to export an average of 27,000 tons of groundnuts per year
between 1868 and 1877.12 Ivory wax and gum were other popular exports
though they tended to be concentrated around Western-Central Africa rather

8
ibid, p148
9
Munro, p45
10
Iliffe, p149
11
ibid
12
ibid
Gabriel Lambert Global and Imperial History

than the west coast.13 Overall, West African foreign trade increased by six or
seven times with Britain and France 1820 to 185014 suggesting that it was the
mid 19th century that one can point to as the time when African integration with
the European market ‘took off’.

However, several important qualifying comments need to be made. Total Sub-

Saharan trade was valued at around £17 million in 1870 which represented an
average annual growth rate of only 0.7% since 1800 compared to a worldwide
growth rate of 5%.15 Indeed, while Africa’s share of world trade had increased in
the 18th century, it declined in the 19th, indicating that the rate of increase was
not sufficient to maintain Africa’s position relative to other countries. Part of the
explanation for this relative decline is the lack of great extension of foreign trade
into the interior – transport links remained too poor to allow such ventures to be
profitable. The prevalence of the tsetse fly prevented the use of draft animals
forcing traders to reply on human portage or, where there were suitable
waterways, canoes. Exports were still limited both in terms of the catchment
area from where they could be drawn (around coasts and rivers) and by the high
transport costs.

Furthermore structural changes in the West African economy were limited to

production rather than exchange. Although the advent of the steamship created
the possibility for direct trade and penetration up the Niger, most trade was still
conducted through the traditional African middlemen – ‘King Denis’ on the
Gambon, ‘King Georges’ on the Ogowe delta and the Tio ‘big men’ of Stanley
pool.16 The latter were a highly specialized trading people who manufactured
jewellery, grew tobacco and imported guns, gunpowder and cloth for re-export
to the interior and who managed to purchase the great bulk of their food from
their trading partners.17 European traders did not, for the majority of the period,
possess adequate means of dealing with the malaria and yellow fever that

13
Curtin, p421
14
Iliffe, p147
15
Munro p62
16
Curtin p425
17
ibid, p426
Gabriel Lambert Global and Imperial History

haunted the ‘white man’s grave’ thus they could not penetrate the interior to cut
out groups like the Tio without serious loss of life. Moreover they possessed
neither the local knowledge to be able to draw on the various scattered sources
of their desired product nor the military force to coerce the local population into
changing the terms of trading agreements. Such a change would have (and
eventually did) provoke conflict with the forest kingdoms such as the Asante
who were involved in the supply of palm oil.

But could the trade that was conducted be seen as evidence of integration into a
‘world’ economy? Africa had no open access to the world market – all
intercontinental trade was controlled by European powers (in the case of West
Africa mostly Britain and France). While trade was technically ‘free’ European
nations had an effective monopoly of access to African markets and exports thus
all contact with the ‘world’ market was regulated by Europe. It would have been
inconceivable for any African state to trade independently with another power,
say, China or South America. Perhaps it would be more fitting to simply refer to
the period as one of European market integration.

One can still conclude that there were two concrete changes in West African
trade in the period between slavery abolition and partition. Firstly, the rapid
expansion of palm oil and groundnut cultivation revealed a new degree of
sensitivity to foreign markets in existing areas of trade. For instance the Krobo
farmers on the East Gold Coast started planting palm oil for export when they
discovered its commercial value.18 Secondly, the increased volume of internal
trade was slowly extending the influence of foreign markets – credit from
Liverpool, Bordeaux and Marseilles financed greater and deeper external trade
while the increasingly large units of exports and imports required bulking or
breaking down, transport and storage on a much greater scale than before (even
if they still used the system of middlemen). The extent to which these market
trends would be extended depended on the nature of their partition.

18
Munro p48
Gabriel Lambert Global and Imperial History

What impact did the ‘scramble’ for Africa have on trade? It largely depended on
the natural endowments of the area concerned and the nature of existing trade,
the strategic importance of that area and the extent of interest taken by rival
competing colonial powers. Thus South Africa’s combination of extensive
pastoral land for sheep-rearing and, more importantly given the falling price of
wool, the presence of diamonds and gold led to capital-intensive investment in
infrastructure and mass immigration which in turn created competition between
the European arrivals, the Boers, and the original African occupants of territory
around the south. The opening of Suez and with it the opening up of East Africa
led to the creation of ‘white highlands’ in Kenya where European immigrants
purchased great tracts of land and then managed production for export using
African labour.19 This was probably a result of the lack of previous connection
with the European economy – the African population was not used to producing
cash crops in plantations or supplying the hungry European market for primary
products. Egypt was occupied and administered by the British partly to prevent
it from defaulting in payments to its foreign investors, and partly for strategic
reasons, specifically the importance to keep the Suez canal open as a passage to
India.

Given West Africa’s history of extensive commerce one might expect a different
pattern of behaviour from colonial powers. Indeed, even though every area was
annexed by 1914, the style of rule was fairly informal and economic concerns
governed most of the behaviour of the European powers. Continuity was found,
not necessarily in the specific crops grown as demand fell for the oils that had
previously been booming and was a fall in prices in line with the economic
depression (further evidence of the connectedness of the West African and
European markets) – Lagos’ oil fell from 2.1s/gallon in 1870-4 to 1.0s/gallon in
1895-1900.20 There was continuity in the mechanism used to produce export
crops though – production remained largely in the hand of Africans. For instance,
the peanut industry of Senegambia took off in Kajor and Waalo with export levels
reaching 15-20,000 metric tons per year in the final quarter of the 19th

19
Curtin p504
20
Munro p68
Gabriel Lambert Global and Imperial History

century,21 Interestingly the business was so successful that it drew families from
the lower Gambian valley, up to 400 miles away, who would come, hire land from
the local lineages and then set up planting themselves, demonstrating the
increasing internal integration of the West African labour market. Production of
cocoa in the Accra plain on the Gold Coast was similar – entrepreneurs from the
Akwapim ridge bought up tracts from the lineages by forming cooperatives. By
1911 the Gold Coast was the single largest cocoa exporter in the world. 22 The
crucial point is that the colonial powers allowed and encouraged private African
ventures of this sort. In 1907 when the Lever soap company requested land in
British West African for a palm oil plantation they were rejected out of political
and social concern for the reception such a plantation would receive by the
locals.23 Colonial administrations were primarily concerned with keeping their
administrative costs down and facilitating trade rather than actively promoting it
with grand infrastructural projects. That is not to say that, with the backing of
their home countries, private trading firms were not keen to knock out the
middlemen – George Goldie used force on the Niger to go straight to the source of
oils in the 1880s. The Asante were conquered and forced to submit by treaty to
Britain in the same period.

21
Curtin p507
22
ibid, p509
23
ibid, p504