Mansa Musa
Warlord
If the Atlantic Slave Trade never occurred, what would've happened to West Africa? The Americas? etc.
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What if the Slave Trade Didn't Happen?
- Thread starter Mansa Musa
- Start date
LightSpectra
me autem minui
Then we could declare our parallel universe search engine to be a success.
Verbose
Deity
I'll have to disagree. On the one hand, some quite significant African states Kongo, Angola which were directly ruined by it, would survive. On the other hand, the other kind of slave-taking "gunpowder empire" states the situation created wouldn't appear, or at least not become what they otherwise did historically like Dahomey. The difference impact would be seen and felt mostly in West Africa of course, and down the coast to Angola, where the Portugese went a-slaving, with a direct shuttle to Brazil across the Atlantic (i.e. no "triangle-trade", just nab'em and pack'em off).
There would have to be some source of labor for the development of the Americas by European colonists. Africa was a logical source because there was already a slave trade running from the Gold Coast area east toward Arabia (and several thousand black slaves being brought to Europe, either around Africa or up through the Sahara caravan routes.
Eliminating the Atlantic trade in humans wouldn't necessarily slow down the trade heading north or east. It might not even effect the supply/demand equation much, since a lot of the slave-taking that occurred was in response to increased demand from the American colonies (most of which featured horrible attrition rates due to the hazards of the sugar/mollasas industry).
Possible labor sources might have come from Russia, North Africa, or the Levant. Turkey did a brisk business in slavery. India and China would be another source of cheap labor (today there is still a significant population of Indian-Caribbeans). If it wasn't actual slavery that took root, some other form of controlling labor like debt servitude or long term contract labor purchased from native authorities to export to the American colonies is a possibility
Shekwan
Kim Chi Quaffing Celt
We would probably live in a far more technologically advanced world. More incentive to invent stuff to do work when you don't have some slave to do it for you.
Civ'ed
I ain't gotta explain a thing
The Spanish could have done some farming instead of Rushing the Aztecs.
Actually, having slaves (or any significant labor supply), creates the greater incentive to come up with more inventions. If there's not a labor supply there, then the work would often just not get attempted.
The prime example of this would be the cotton gin. Because the slave supply in the US southeast was plentiful, but the terrain wasn't ideal for sugar, cotton was introduced as a second cash crop (along side tobacco) from the debt-prone region. This provided the incentive for the technological advance of the cotton gin, which had the effect of increasing the demand for menial labor in the cotton fields. The purpose of the gin is to remove the seeds from the cotton fibers, which was previously a labor intensive activity. Once the gin reduced processing overhead, the demand for the raw good shot up, and thus the demand for slave labor shot up.
So my guess is that, without the African influx into the west, and Afro-Caribbean influx into the US, there'd be a lot less incentive for technological progress in the US south and the Antilles. I'm not sure it'd affect the northern parts of North America that much, where slavery was never much of a viable economic model. Even without the textile mills (which were dependent on nearby cotton production), there'd still be a demand for labor-saving innovations (called the American System of Manufacture).
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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Kongo and Angola?
In any case, Kongo broke up in civil war which didn't had anything to do with the slave trade specifically. The slave trade hadn't ruined the kingdom for the previous 150 years.
Verbose
Deity
Well, I'm sure I can now safely rely on you to present the details of the after all very significant Portugese slaving-activity down that coast in comprehensive detail. After all, someone should in this thread.
GinandTonic
Saphire w/ Schweps + Lime
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Interesting to consider how it would have affected the industrial revolution. Without the triangular trade the whole economics of the time (at least for the brits) would have been different. Not nearly so easy to turn manufactured goods into sugar, cotton etc without the slave trade.
aronnax
Let your spirit be free
I'm not sure how that counters what I said.
If Kongo and Angola hadn't been ruined by slave trade, they would've been conquered by Europeans later, just as Dahomey eventually was. The net result (none of these states existing today with former European colonies existing instead) would be the same.
Kind of like Central America would likely be very much the same today even if the Aztec Empire had never risen and the Spanish had encounted Toltecs instead.
Verbose
Deity
It's of course all a big What-If, as we know. Possibly with a longer history of large scale and more advanced societies like that, we would get a different tweak to the "postcolonial dilemma". I.e. the period of direct colonisation of most of Africa might have been short, about 60 years give or take, but it still has cause such a massive upheaval there is now all kinds of weird fantasies about what a lovely time everyone had prior to colonisation, and whitey screwed it all up. No one really knows what things were like, so these fantasies get legs. With a sturdier past of large and complex societies there would be a chance for a more realistic, indigenous, assessment of African history. The slave-trade hit in particular the most populous, most advanced and complex African societies. (Most warm bodies there.) And broke them up. The early slavers knew fully well that several of the groups of slaves they were dealing with were fully literate Muslims fx. Then it's of course a very bloody irony that western notions about "natural" African inferiority got pasted on the people from these complex west African societies that got broken from slave-trading. "Gun powder empire" might be good for the brutal and determined, but not for finer aspects. And they most definitely were being fed by European demand, European money, and European guns that's how they fitted in with the western global trade network, which shipped slaves from Africa to America, silver from America to China, produce from China, furs from the North American natives etc., etc., etc...
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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Well, I'm sure I can now safely rely on you to present the details of the after all very significant Portugese slaving-activity down that coast in comprehensive detail. After all, someone should in this thread.
Well, to start with the only relevant kingdom in the area was Kongo. Where you want to find a native "kingdom of Angola" without the interference of those foreign slavers I do not know. Ngola was a product of that intervention! No slave trade = no kingdom of Ngola.
And I dare say that the prosperity and endurance of the kingdom of Kongo had more than a little to do with the way it fitted into the wider trading networks, including the slave trade. The equation was simple: no slavery = no warfare = no income for the king do distribute = no kingdom in short order. Kongo exercised full control over its area and could have traded other things, but they chose to continued to feed the slave trade, they had internal reasons to do so and needed it for their continued stability. Even when kings complained about slavers, they were complaining about slavers operation without the king receiving his cut! It's disingenuous to claim that this trade was an european imposition on Africa. And it's impossible to guess how Africa might have evolved it the Atlantic slave trade never existed. Internal slave trading would still exist, for every human society which engaged in welfare has also had slavery under one name or another, up to the 19th century. Hell, we Europeans were doing it to other europeans during and after World War II!
Keep in mind that until the end of the 19th century when modern weapons, medical knowledge, and railways and steam boats allowed European states to start conquering large territories in Africa, all trade in Africa was controlled by african powers. They opened and closed the trade routes at will, chose which products to offer and took them to the markets by the coast. European penetration into the interior was very limited, basically a few caravans directed by a handful of portuguese merchants starting in the end of the 19th century in Angola and entirety dependent on the cooperation of the african rulers, whose territories they crossed, who controlled the trading, supplied the carriers and supervisors, and taxed the profits. There as a brief period of attempts at military control over the "interior" (roughly some 200km from the coast between Luanda and Benguela) during 1760-1780, which coincided with the foundation of a few forts, but these were for all practical purposes then abandoned until the 1890s, as the soldiers initially sent there simply would either die of sickness or desert and interest in the project disappeared. Possibly the most relevant outcome of that 18th century efforts at expansion was the transmission of writing to africans, by the jesuit missions, namely Saint Hilarious in Ambaca. These missions were closed in 1760, but by then the kings and important chiefs already had secretaries to record their commercial transaction, handle correspondence, etc. These african secretaries formed a professional class which transmitted that knowledge and kept their positions from then on, supporting an intense exchange of correspondence about everyday facts of life among african rulers and other individuals able to afford their services. In this (as in many other things, such as metalsmithing) Africa was quickly catching up with Europe, learning, transmitting and even improving technologies gained through the new contacts.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much interest yet in mining that correspondence for historical knowledge, nor in studying the technical evolution of african societies. Perhaps because the history of Africa is still dominated by two ideologically motivated groups: the "pro-colonialism" ones who disregard african initiatives and would rather believe that the continent had remained stagnant until the scramble for Africa began, and the "anti-colonial" one who would automatically classify any european influence (those letters were written in portuguese) as "colonial" and ignore it?
For a short overview about the history of the adoption and spread of writing in western Africa, take a look at this, for example. There may be a french translation somewhere.
GoodGame
Red, White, & Blue, baby!
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What if the native americans were used as the primary slave source?
Mostly a lack of cheap agricultural labor would mean much slower settlement of North America by the Europeans, though it might also mean a more plural settling, or say no Australia, but send the debtors and criminals to America? Definitely less lucrative colonization. Would we see more Continental recruitment for colonization? A more ethnically diverse America from the start? Less or more conflict between the monarchs (e.g. less wealth, fewer soldiers, fewer wars?)?
