Coercion and Markets: Reconciling Economic and Social Explanations of Slavery in Precolonial West Africa, c1450-c1900

Enslavement and slave trading were the main source of labour recruitment, apart from marriage and child-rearing, in the economies of precolonial West Africa. As elsewhere, first-generation slaves in African societies were mostly foreigners. Unlike the slavery practised by Europeans, however, indigenous African slavery usually had an assimilative element, the descendants of slaves tended to be integrated into the society concerned on increasingly more equal terms over subsequent generations, with varying rates and degrees of completion. The conjunction of slave labour and partial assimilation has generated a long-running debate between ‘economic’ and ‘social’ interpretations of the institution in its West Africa. This article reconciles and integrates these traditionally rival interpretations, and to explore the economic implications. I argue that it was the interaction of economic and social (and cultural and political) dimensions of slavery that was central to the history of slavery in precolonial West Africa. The growth in slavery and the specific uses to which slaves were put cannot be explained without reference to the demand for slaves as labourers producing commodities. At the same time, without organized coercion, and the political and ideological conditions for applying it, there could have been no slavery and no slave trade. Indeed, it is argued here that, without such coercion, there would have been no labour market at all in the economic conditions that prevailed in most of West Africa during this era. In this sense, the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis applies in its strongest form. Moreover, the assimilative tendency in African slavery should be seen both as responding to the severe constraints on state formation and, ironically, as underpinning the continuation of the internal slave trade.