Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries European traders, missionaries, soldiers
etc began to arrive in sub-Saharan Africa establishing economic and to some extent
political relationships that led ultimately to the colonial expansion of the industrialized,
capitalist society. Before the impact of the industrial revolution in the late 18 th century
the dominant form of capital in Europe was merchant capital, capital originating from
individuals or companies of traders. At its most sophisticated, long distance commerce
could begin to call on joint stock companies, chartered ventures protected through royal
monopoly and pioneer insurance firms. The colonial slave plantations were the greatest
innovation of this pioneering phase of capitalism. But merchant capital’s ability to
transform productive relations was limited. This was to depend on the gradual development of the world market, its tentacles stretching to every continent including Africa.
The most notorious aspect of this early contact period was the trade in men and women
which took millions of Africans across the Atlantic to the plantations of the new world.
Let’s look at how capitalism spread into Africa, especially following the continent`s
contact with Europe.
1. The Portuguese Epoch
For two centuries, from the mid 15th to the mid 17th , the Portuguese were overwhelmingly
the most important European presence in Africa. The Portuguese traders and merchants
were greatly interested in the spice trade, in precious metals, particularly gold and in
forging strategic alliances against Egypt and then the Ottoman Empire. By the early 16th
C., these interests began to mesh into a structure of strategic and economic considerations
of world dimensions and complexity. Portuguese expansion was however not a
consequence of the particularly advanced state of the Portuguese economy. The
manufacturing sector in Portugal was weak. What Portugal sold to Africa originated
mainly from other parts of Europe. Various Portuguese sailors, including Vasco da
Gama sailed to distant lands to open up trade routes and commercial links. The
Portuguese’s greatest strength lay not in superior techniques of manufacture but in their
advanced weaponry and sailing skills. As a result there was a very strong element of
force in the character of Portuguese commercial intrusion. It was within this context that
the Portuguese forced various contact towns into submission, imposed strategic and
strong forts e.g Fort Jesus, Elmina and set up effective systems of collecting tribute.
2.The Atlantic Slave Trade
Many works have been written on the history of the Atlantic slave trade. Indeed as
Walter Rodney (1972:103) has observed, to discuss trade between Africans and
Europeans in the four centuries before colonial rule is virtually to discuss slave trade of
which the Atlantic slave trade was central. As the author has put it plainly, the slave
trade was conducted mainly by Europeans and the slaves were destined to markets
controlled by Europeans and was in the interest of European capitalism and nothing else.
In economic terms, the organization and evolution of sugar plantations and other forms
especially in the Americas, demanding large inputs of firmly controlled, hard worked
human labour determined the history of the trade. The first European run sugar
plantations were in Cyprus. The focus then moved westwards through the Mediterranean
to Sicily, Southern Portugal, then the Atlantic Islands of Madeira and Sao Tome. Sao
Tome at the end of the 15th Century was the earliest slave plantation to rely
overwhelmingly on African labour. From the Atlantic Islands the focus of sugar
production then shifted to the tropical colonies of the New World whose vast lands
required settlers to be exploited effectively. It was mainly the Portuguese initiative which
created an important original plantation nucleus in the North-east Brazil. During the
1630s and due to the weakness of Portuguese power both economically and politically,
the Dutch temporarily succeeded in conquering part of Brazil and in so doing mastered
the art of sugar milling. They seized the importance of Portuguese slave trade in
providing a vast coerced work force. The need for African slaves also expanded with the
opening up of large British plantations in Jamaica, and the French colony of St.
Domingue (Haiti). By the 18th C Haiti was the greatest exploiter of African labour. The
merchant fleets of France, and industrializing Britain, overtook the Dutch to become the
major slaving powers of the 18th C. The Portuguese too expanded their slave trade and
remained the third most important agent while most of the other European powers, as
well as Brazil and New England were active participants.
Slave trade was a factor in the accumulation of capital which helped to fuel the industrial
revolution. The casual link cannot be traced directly for the trade itself (and Euro-
African commerce in general) was just one element in a great complex of economic
activities; the plantations, their exports, their consumption of foodstuffs and textiles from
Europe, North America and the general development of shipping, to name only the most
obvious. Slaving played its part in laying the foundations of capitalism within this
broader structure made possible by the expansion of world commerce.
At its height, slave trade overtook or entirely replaced other forms of commerce between
Europe and Africa. The gold export trade of Elmina virtually disappeared in the 18th
century as the Gold Coast too became a major slave exporter. The Senegambian region,
largely transformed into an exporter of gum Arabic, was an exception, as was the extreme
south of Africa where a colony of settlement developed under Dutch rule and into which
the slaves were imported. However, it is generally fitting to treat the period of contact
from the mid 17th to the early 19th C as an era of slave trade. The Atlantic slave trade did
increase enormously the amount of slaving in Africa.
In recent years there has been considerable research into quantifying the slave trade.
Phillip Curtin in 1969 estimated that between 8-9 million slaves were dispatched from
Africa to the Americas. Subsequent studies have raised these figures by some 25 to 50
per cent to include those who died before reaching the African Coast or on the Coast
waiting to be sold. It is however virtually impossible to gauge the exact number of
slaves. What is clear is that such a huge number of people lost from Africa had a severe
effect on the population. Slaves were dispatched from Africa over a period of almost
four (4) centuries (mainly between 1540-1850). The impact of such crucial factors as the
preponderance of young and energetic males to the economy cannot be ignored.
Slaves were exported in exchange for new commodities from Europe and the Americas.
The most important of these items were European textiles, metal ware, salt, alcohol, guns
etc. Where inter-African trade existed, European merchants participated and controlled it.
It must be emphasized that with the development of slave trade the significance of Africa
as a source of labour and as part of the great global commercial network grew markedly.
A crucial difference between merchant and industrialized capital is that the former
generally depended on interconnections between existing productive and social systems and the profits which can be obtained through mastering the forces between them, while
the latter derives from an actual transformation in a productive system as a whole.
Merchant capital characterized the dominated world enterprise before the industrial
revolution of the late 18th century. During this period, corresponding productive changes
occurred only to a limited extent especially in Africa. Where European penetration of
Africa went deepest e.g in Congo kingdom, Angola and Mozambique, it did so by
adapting to the existing political and social ideologies and relationships.
As a result of this, the colonialist in alliance with local rating classes in Africa sharpened
their predatory character and orientation to trade in imported manufactures. In the same
way, they acted as key figures in converting Africa into a dependency on the West as a
periphery within a neatly articulated world economic structure. The dependency
therefore developed as part of the logic of the needs of the dominant strata and classes in
Africa. This becomes important when examining the history of the later part of the 19th
century and especially as it relates to the penetration and entrenchment of colonial
capitalism.
Titany answered the question on December 8, 2021 at 09:11