Wikipedia says many local African kingdoms provided people, usually prisoners of war or criminals, to European slave traders. What happened to these African Kingdom's economy between the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and the scramble for Africa?

by Chuckun

gnikivar2

Probably the best recorded case is that of the Kingdom of the Kongo during the era of mass slavery. The Kongo Kingdom was a fairly centralized and independent kingdom at the time of European contact. They quickly adopted Catholicism and other European technologies. However, their primary export was slaves and this had a devastating impact on the economy. Originally, slaves were only sold from non Kongo peoples. However, a pattern emerged where nobles would acquire guns with the proceeds of selling slaves. They would use these guns to war against other nobles and the king. In order to fund these wars, they would sell members of Kongolese clans, and eventually members of their own clans, and in some cases family into slavery to fight a series of never ending wars. The entire state collapsed under this weight, and the region became an impoverished colony of Portugal.

More broadly, many of the trading networks in Africa became structured around the provision of slaves. I think it's telling that the great precolonial trading empires of the Swahili Coast have largely lost their economic relevance, and I think a part of that is that they were slave societies that could not adapt to post-slavery economic order.

Slavery also made some of the most extreme forms of colonialism worst. The Congo Free State (I'd strongly recommend reading King Leopold's Ghost) recruited their Force Publique, the African soldiers in charge of administering the brutality of the rubber and ivory trades, from the Bangala people, the same group of people who were the primary slave traders at the time. In fact, the two lingua francas of the DRC, Lingala and Swahili, are the languages of the slave, rubber and ivory traders. You saw a similar pattern in the Central African Republic, the poorest country in the world today.

As far as the overall impact of slavery is concerned, it's hard to measure. Coastal West Africa, one of the most intensely enslaved regions, also had a much less exploitative colonial system than other regions of Africa. But the best research suggests that the regions most impacted by the slave trade are poorer today, have lower levels of interpersonal trust, and higher levels of conflict.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40206695

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3710252/Nunn_Long-TermEffects.pdf?sequence=2

http://www.gsdrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/CAR_Jan2016.pdf

'Where Have All the Slaves Gone?'Emancipation and Post-Emancipation in Lamu, Kenya

Commustar

Great question!

The shortest answer is that in the early 1800s, beginning before the 1807 british proclamation banning trade in slaves across the Atlantic, African kingdoms on the Atlantic coast began to produce more agricultural products like palm oil and peanut oil, for use in European and North American industry. As the slave trade was outlawed, and effective enforcement of the ban began in the late 1830s, these African kingdoms shifted to these agricultural exports, using the slave labor that would otherwise have been exported in supporting this domestic agriculture.

However, it is slightly more complicated than that. Only the societies that were within close transport range of the Atlantic were able to export these agricultural products. Slave-trading societies that were further inland and away from major river systems could not effectively tap into this export market, and their economies were very likely changed drastically.

Conversely, there were also societies that had played little part in the slave trade which became major players in the palm oil trade.

Now, if we choose to look more broadly at Central and Eastern Africa (i.e. regions of the continent that had not participated in the Atlantic slave trade to any significant extent), we again see economic transformation in this era from ~1830-1880. In this case, it is an increasing reach of East African traders, whether Swahili, Arab, or Nyamwezi, into the heart of Central Africa.

These traders brought guns with them, and the period from 1830 onwards sees massive and rapacious trade in slaves from the great lakes region and Katanga/Zambia region to the Indian Ocean coast.

In parallel, guns reaching Central Africa also meant great changes to the way that elephants were hunted, and so a large boom in ivory exports also headed to East Africa (although Msiri's Garengaze state also traded to the west with the Ovimbundu states, and thence to Portuguese Angola)