Slaving and Slave Trading in Africa

Abstract

Slavery in Africa dates to antiquity. Slave trading networks in Africa transported people across the Sahara and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, with significant numbers of people sent to the Middle East, India, central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. Africa, however, was not only a source of export of people; enslaved persons were also imported into the continent. This article reviews scholarly research into the capture, trade, and use of enslaved men, women, and children in Africa, with a focus on Ghana. It suggests that the history and legacies of slavery and slave trading cannot be understood without reference to African historiography, the politics of knowledge production, and present-day heritage tourism. In reviewing the historical and anthropological research, it also introduces some of the possibilities, problems, and challenges of archaeological approaches to studying slavery and slave trading to demonstrate that archaeology is in conversation with—and of value to—those outside the discipline.

New views on price-making markets and the capitalist impulse: beyond Polanyi

“…We begin this discussion by borrowing from the insight of Hart (2019, p. 27-30) that capitalists, wishing to escape the limitations of a regulated and moral economy and its institutional structures, turned to the implementation of a slave-based economy "facing outwards toward oceans and empires" (2019, p. 30). Their expansive new domain and slavebased economy flourished in social settings highly suited to their goals, including sub-Saharan West Africa, a region with a lengthy history of slaving and slave trading (e.g., Miers and Kopytoff, 1977;Engmann, 2023) and a highly developed commercial economy easily accessed by European slavers in coastal centers such as Dahomey (e.g., Law, 1986). The merchants in Dahomey and other coastal centers had access to the slave trade and were eager to sell slaves in exchange for valuable European weapons.…”