Merchant and Military in Atlantic Africa: The Slaving State

As the external demand for slaves increased in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, vast areas of Atlantic Africa – including both shorelinecommunities and those across several hundred miles of hinterland – becamemilitarised zones. The scale of warfare increased, and war itself became anextension of polity and economy; militarism became a matter of culturalcelebration within many communities from the southern fringes of the Sahara tothe northern edge of the Kalahari. Asserting the correlation between the slavetrade and organised violence is hardly controversial; what is of interest here,however, is the manner in which warfare changed in this period, and how bothconstruction and destruction resulted, in political and economic terms.Inevitably the impact and intensity of the trade varied from area to area:Whereas Senegambia and Angola had been mainstays of slave supplies for Europeanssince the mid-sixteenth century, new regions opened up in the seventeenthcentury, notably the Slave Coast (southwest Nigeria and Benin) and theneighbouring Gold Coast on the Gulf of Guinea. This stretch of shoreline, some400 miles long, became home to a series of forts – more or less permanentEuropean settlements – from the mid-seventeenth century, tapping into theveritable flood of slaves brought about by the rise of such states as Dahomey,Oyo and Asante. It was a circular process, not to say a matter ofchicken-and-egg: While such states arose at least partly in response to theslave trade, the presence of Dutch, English, French and Danish traders on thecoast – themselves responding to ready supplies – encouragedfurther slave trading (and raiding) to go on, which in turn encouraged morebuyers to cluster at the coast. Thus the militarisation of African society andeconomy was a cumulative process, and involved the emergence of what has becomeknown as the ‘slaving state’.