The Transatlantic Slave Trade in Africa

This chapter considers the economics of the international slave trades in Africa. It documents a gun–slave cycle at the heart of the eighteenth-century British slave trade, and the independent effect of guns on African slave exports before 1740. Once established, the gun–slave cycle changed the norms of intergroup conflict, producing a regional prisoners’ dilemma arms race of “raid or be raided” that few Africans could avoid, even if they wanted to. Regional histories confirm the importance of guns in the timeline of regional slave exports. The chapter concludes with an evaluation of available data on the inland origins of slave exports, finding them to be representative of eighteenth and nineteenth-century origins, but not before. Maps depicting eighteenth and nineteenth-century catchment zones are used to contextualize and interpret the firsthand observations of the British explorer David Livingstone, who walked through the interior districts of southcentral Africa as they were being transformed into catchment zones by gun–slave cycles.