How the Slave Trades Underdeveloped Africa

This chapter uses travel time to document how exposure to international slave trades produced Africa as a mirror image of Europe. At the regional level, the fundamental impact reduced the size of polities and increased the proliferation of ethnicities, a model flexible enough to explain the seemingly opposite outcomes of Asante and Aro. Exposure to the trade of captives on their way to the coast encouraged the spread of institution designed to preserve slave wealth: slavery, polygyny, and inheritance rules that concentrated wealth and political power in aristocratic families. Exposure to capture spread slavery among politically decentralized societies. Exposure also disrupted long-standing lineage and inheritance rules, indicating revolutionary changes in the political, economic, and cultural organization of societies. The inverse relationship between the export of slaves and the demand for money is evidence of a breakdown in specialization and trade that opened the door to Indian and British textile imports – underdevelopment’s version of import substitution.