Re-envisages what we know about African political economies through its examination of one of the key questions in colonial and African history, that of commercial agriculture and its relationship to slavery.
This book considers commercial agriculture in Africa in relation to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery within Africa itself, from the beginnings of European maritime trade in the fifteenth century to theearly stages of colonial rule in the twentieth century.
From the outset, the export of agricultural produce from Africa represented a potential alternative to the slave trade: although the predominant trend was to transport enslaved Africans to the Americas to cultivate crops, there was recurrent interest in the possibility of establishing plantations in Africa to produce such crops, or to purchase them from independent African producers. Thisidea gained greater currency in the context of the movement for the abolition of the slave trade from the late eighteenth century onwards, when the promotion of commercial agriculture in Africa was seen as a means of suppressing the slave trade. At the same time, the slave trade itself stimulated commercial agriculture in Africa, to supply provisions for slave-ships in the Middle Passage. Commercial agriculture was also linked to slavery within Africa, since slaves were widely employed there in agricultural production. Although Abolitionists hoped that production of export crops in Africa would be based on free labour, in practice it often employed enslaved labour, so that slaveryin Africa persisted into the colonial period.
Robin Law is Emeritus Professor of African History, University of Stirling; Suzanne Schwarz is Professor of History, University of Worcester; Silke Strickrodt is Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham.
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Introduction
The slave trade and commercial agriculture in an African context – David Eltis
São Tomé and Príncipe: The first plantation economy in the tropics – Gerhard Seibert
The export of rice and millet from Upper Guinea into the 16th-century Atlantic trade – Toby Green
‘Our indico designe’: Planting and processing indigo for export, Upper Guinea coast, 1684-1702 – Colleen E Kriger
‘There’s nothing grows in the West Indies but will grow here’: European projects of plantation agriculture on the Gold Coast, 1650s-1780s – Robin Law
The origins of ‘legitimate commerce’ – Christopher Brown
Friederichsnopel: A Danish project of commercial agriculture on the Gold Coast, 1788-1793 – Per Hernaes
‘The Colony has made no progress in agriculture’: Contested perceptions of agriculture in the colonies of Sierra Leone and Liberia – Bronwen Everill
Church Missionary Society projects of agricultural improvement in the 19th century: Sierra Leone and Yorubaland – Kehinde Olabimtan
Agricultural enterprise and unfree labour in 19th-century Angola – Roquinaldo Ferreira
Commercial agriculture and the ending of slave-trading and slavery in West Africa, 1780s-1920s – Gareth Austin
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