Ghana has a longer, more accessible coastline with natural harbors, while southern Nigeria is swampy, lagoon-filled, and harder to navigate. The Niger Delta was among the deadliest environments for Europeans.
Ghana’s coast was still malarial, but less lethal. This allowed Europeans to establish forts at places like Cape Coast and Elmina Castle. Though Europeans still died, these semi-permanent bases gave rise to small Euro-African (‘mulatto’) communities. They were never more than 1K to 2K at best.
Very interesting article. I would add that slave labor in the Americas was not as productive as it appears. Most of it was used to harvest consumption products like sugar, tobacco, and rum. Both the Europeans and African middlemen were harvesting humans for pure (and unhealthy) consumption.
Fair point. I totally agree in absolute terms that slave cash crops isnt very productive. There's this silly debate on Twitter I am seeing where some people think slavery made america a superpower which is silly since our superpower gave from northeast industrialization.
There is a galaxy-brained argument that northeast infra was funded by the federal government, and the federal government was funded in part by tariffs paid by southeast plantation owners, who found the money to pay those tariffs by selling cash crops.
But yeah, I think you are broadly correct that industrialization in the northeast was much closer to being "America's secret sauce", and that also helps explain why the North won the Civil War.
In any case, there is no question that African-Americans have made a tremendous contribution to American culture in terms of music, movies, sport, comedy, and so forth.
Totally agree on black contribution to culture. Without black people, america would be like canada or australia or new Zealand i dont hear about any movies, comedy, or music coming from there.
The entire first 100 years of the American government spending isnt even 1/3 of the amount that it spent in 1918 (in inflation adjusted dollars).
Most infrastructure, especially big ticket items like the Erie Canal, in the northeast was financed by local states, private investors, and municipal bonds.
I dont think this is an entirely fair adjustment. Although the products produced by slave plantations were not exactly value added commodities, the massive and round the year (i.e reliable) supply of these commodities were key factors for the growth of Euro-American commodities market and speculators, who would later invest their money in industrialization.
Yes, there were indirect impacts, but the primary use of slaves were for producing non-productive stimulants.
Most of the early industries in British industrialization were low capital required at startup and did not need outside investment. The biggest use of accumulated capital by slave-owners, slave-traders and market speculators in the 18th Century was to purchase family estates in the countyside so their children could become respected members of the upper class. Relatively little was invested in manufacturing.
Large amounts of capital were not really needed until the British railroad boom of the 1830s after the slave trade and slavery had been banned.
Unfortunately, it was very unproductive all the way around, but made a tiny percentage wealthy (and often newly titled) landowners.
We need to be precise about causality and distinguish between sectors of industrialization that relied on slave commodities and those that did not.
I more-or-less agree with you that Southern cotton was an important input for textiles. But cotton (or other plantation crops like tobacco, rice, and sugar) had nothing to do with the rise of ironworks, shipbuilding, glassworks, small mills, and machine tools. Those industries were built on domestic resources: coal from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Appalachia; timber from the Northeast and Midwest; and iron ore from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota. Their energy came from steam power, and their capital came from local banks in New England. A bank in Virginia or South Carolina was not financing iron or steel production in Rhode Island.
The reason I qualified with "more-or-less" for Southern cotton is because even if U.S. cotton vanished, cotton mills would've sourced more from British India, Ottoman Turkey, Brazil, or Muhammad Ali of Egypt. In fact, during the U.S. Civil War's "cotton famine" in the 1860s, they did exactly that.
Even before independence, America was already attracting skilled artisans from the Netherlands, England, and the German states in the Holy Roman Empire, who helped transfer technical knowledge. Early American banks in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York were set up by merchant families. They financed shipping, timber, wheat, furs, and insurance — not plantation agriculture.
So yes, textiles drew on cotton, but the broader industrial base in the U.S. was fueled by coal, iron, timber, skilled immigrants, and local finance, not by plantation commodities.
I haven’t finished the article yet, but it reminded me of a conversation I once had with my sister. We were talking about how Africans participated in the transatlantic slave trade by capturing and selling others. My first thought was that it must have been driven by the greed of our leaders at the time. But my sister reminded me that, for many kingdoms and families
, it was a matter of survival you either attacked, or you were attacked. That tension between survival and morality still lingers as one of the most painful complexities of our history.
Great point. That was exactly the point i was making with Benin. It banned the slave trade for 2 centuries, but it needed to bring it back to not get eaten alive by Dahomey or Oyo. Benin was able to stay independent until 1897. Security beats morality.
Secondly, I know you havent finished the article yet. But when you get to the part on Whydah and Allada, those kingdoms were coastal brokers. They werent selling their people, but selling other africans that they didnt care about. There was no collective black consciousness or pan africanism then. Whydah and Allada were just trying to amass more stuff, and they were at a great strategic location.
Something that should be mentioned is the effect of slavery on the community and family lives of those affected; children without parents, elderly without support, villages without leadership, societies without guiding principles, and a people without protection and creativity of its youth. For slavers, the noxious influence is felt back home. "Northanger Abbey" has a reference of a young girl coming face to face with the reality of what the elite are doing abroad. There are missionary accounts of the addition of alcohol and guns to local villages and the breakdown of societal norms by the raids and sales of human cargo. What we see now, of course, is the effect of disruption of American society by faceless thugs who kidnap people off streets and away from fields and factories. Children are abandoned as their parents are dragged away. The conditions in which the victims are confined are not very different from the barracoons and ships of yore. What the social and home life is for the captors has become is a topic for future study.
Ghana has a longer, more accessible coastline with natural harbors, while southern Nigeria is swampy, lagoon-filled, and harder to navigate. The Niger Delta was among the deadliest environments for Europeans.
Ghana’s coast was still malarial, but less lethal. This allowed Europeans to establish forts at places like Cape Coast and Elmina Castle. Though Europeans still died, these semi-permanent bases gave rise to small Euro-African (‘mulatto’) communities. They were never more than 1K to 2K at best.
In "Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1500-1750," Immanuel Wallerstein traces the Netherlands' Hegemony until the Dutch defeat by the British. (It took four wars). In 1618, Europe began the 30 years' war. It was one year before the infamous year that began slavery in the U.S., and cost Europe eight million lives. The Dutch have been dubiously credited as having invented capitalism.
It's part II (of four) of Wallerstein's series. Kofi bought books 2,3&4, for me, but I haven't completed the series with the first, which covered the move from feudalism to capitalism. The author introduced the series with "World-Systems Analysis; An Introduction." It's brief and ends with an assignment on the last page: "We need first of all to try to understand clearly what is going on. We need then to make our choices about the directions in which we want the world to go. And we must finally figure out how we can act in the present so that it is likely to go in the direction we prefer. We can think of these three tasks as the intellectual, the moral, and the political tasks." Piece of cake, Prof. Wallerstein!
Into the scene of societal breakdown of the 1840s came missionaries who faced almost certain death to spread the good news of God's kingdom. They couldn't rest on ships off the coast but had to live among the people they served, facing disease and occasional violence from slavers and local potentates. Malaria was a major killer, as it is now. Disruption of America by the MAGA cult, with its racism and lawlessness is accompanied by economic stress on the middle and lower classes that reduces entropy toward the deported, even as global depression dulled the senses of the German people during Hitler's rise to power. How we read or heard about heroes who put themselves on the line for the Underground Railroad or sheltered Jews in WWII and wondered what we would do in times of social and political conflict. We have our chance now.
The Bight of Benin (Slave Coast) isn’t the Gold Coast. The major gold deposits were in modern Ghana, not in the Slave Coast in the Niger Delta or southern Nigeria. The Niger Delta was swampy and unhealthy for Europeans, but more importantly, it simply didn’t have the same gold deposits as the Gold Coast.
To pay 386 lbs of cowries (about 175,000 shells), Europeans would divide them into bags. A standard “bag” was about 20,000 shells (~44 lbs). That means one slave cost roughly 9 bags of cowries. The Dutch and other Europeans carried these in bulk, sometimes shipping tens of tons of cowries at a time.
Fantastic question. The answer is geography.
Ghana has a longer, more accessible coastline with natural harbors, while southern Nigeria is swampy, lagoon-filled, and harder to navigate. The Niger Delta was among the deadliest environments for Europeans.
Ghana’s coast was still malarial, but less lethal. This allowed Europeans to establish forts at places like Cape Coast and Elmina Castle. Though Europeans still died, these semi-permanent bases gave rise to small Euro-African (‘mulatto’) communities. They were never more than 1K to 2K at best.
Very interesting article. I would add that slave labor in the Americas was not as productive as it appears. Most of it was used to harvest consumption products like sugar, tobacco, and rum. Both the Europeans and African middlemen were harvesting humans for pure (and unhealthy) consumption.
Fair point. I totally agree in absolute terms that slave cash crops isnt very productive. There's this silly debate on Twitter I am seeing where some people think slavery made america a superpower which is silly since our superpower gave from northeast industrialization.
There is a galaxy-brained argument that northeast infra was funded by the federal government, and the federal government was funded in part by tariffs paid by southeast plantation owners, who found the money to pay those tariffs by selling cash crops.
But yeah, I think you are broadly correct that industrialization in the northeast was much closer to being "America's secret sauce", and that also helps explain why the North won the Civil War.
In any case, there is no question that African-Americans have made a tremendous contribution to American culture in terms of music, movies, sport, comedy, and so forth.
Totally agree on black contribution to culture. Without black people, america would be like canada or australia or new Zealand i dont hear about any movies, comedy, or music coming from there.
Even that argument is faulty since federal spending pre-civil was was 2% of gdp.
The federal government was really really small back then. Look at these historical tables of US federal spending:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-resources/budget/historical-tables/
The entire first 100 years of the American government spending isnt even 1/3 of the amount that it spent in 1918 (in inflation adjusted dollars).
Most infrastructure, especially big ticket items like the Erie Canal, in the northeast was financed by local states, private investors, and municipal bonds.
I dont think this is an entirely fair adjustment. Although the products produced by slave plantations were not exactly value added commodities, the massive and round the year (i.e reliable) supply of these commodities were key factors for the growth of Euro-American commodities market and speculators, who would later invest their money in industrialization.
Yes, there were indirect impacts, but the primary use of slaves were for producing non-productive stimulants.
Most of the early industries in British industrialization were low capital required at startup and did not need outside investment. The biggest use of accumulated capital by slave-owners, slave-traders and market speculators in the 18th Century was to purchase family estates in the countyside so their children could become respected members of the upper class. Relatively little was invested in manufacturing.
Large amounts of capital were not really needed until the British railroad boom of the 1830s after the slave trade and slavery had been banned.
Unfortunately, it was very unproductive all the way around, but made a tiny percentage wealthy (and often newly titled) landowners.
We need to be precise about causality and distinguish between sectors of industrialization that relied on slave commodities and those that did not.
I more-or-less agree with you that Southern cotton was an important input for textiles. But cotton (or other plantation crops like tobacco, rice, and sugar) had nothing to do with the rise of ironworks, shipbuilding, glassworks, small mills, and machine tools. Those industries were built on domestic resources: coal from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Appalachia; timber from the Northeast and Midwest; and iron ore from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota. Their energy came from steam power, and their capital came from local banks in New England. A bank in Virginia or South Carolina was not financing iron or steel production in Rhode Island.
The reason I qualified with "more-or-less" for Southern cotton is because even if U.S. cotton vanished, cotton mills would've sourced more from British India, Ottoman Turkey, Brazil, or Muhammad Ali of Egypt. In fact, during the U.S. Civil War's "cotton famine" in the 1860s, they did exactly that.
You can read more about that here: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2015/11/crisis-chronicles-the-cotton-famine-of-1862-63-and-the-us-one-dollar-note
Even before independence, America was already attracting skilled artisans from the Netherlands, England, and the German states in the Holy Roman Empire, who helped transfer technical knowledge. Early American banks in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York were set up by merchant families. They financed shipping, timber, wheat, furs, and insurance — not plantation agriculture.
So yes, textiles drew on cotton, but the broader industrial base in the U.S. was fueled by coal, iron, timber, skilled immigrants, and local finance, not by plantation commodities.
I haven’t finished the article yet, but it reminded me of a conversation I once had with my sister. We were talking about how Africans participated in the transatlantic slave trade by capturing and selling others. My first thought was that it must have been driven by the greed of our leaders at the time. But my sister reminded me that, for many kingdoms and families
, it was a matter of survival you either attacked, or you were attacked. That tension between survival and morality still lingers as one of the most painful complexities of our history.
Great point. That was exactly the point i was making with Benin. It banned the slave trade for 2 centuries, but it needed to bring it back to not get eaten alive by Dahomey or Oyo. Benin was able to stay independent until 1897. Security beats morality.
Secondly, I know you havent finished the article yet. But when you get to the part on Whydah and Allada, those kingdoms were coastal brokers. They werent selling their people, but selling other africans that they didnt care about. There was no collective black consciousness or pan africanism then. Whydah and Allada were just trying to amass more stuff, and they were at a great strategic location.
Something that should be mentioned is the effect of slavery on the community and family lives of those affected; children without parents, elderly without support, villages without leadership, societies without guiding principles, and a people without protection and creativity of its youth. For slavers, the noxious influence is felt back home. "Northanger Abbey" has a reference of a young girl coming face to face with the reality of what the elite are doing abroad. There are missionary accounts of the addition of alcohol and guns to local villages and the breakdown of societal norms by the raids and sales of human cargo. What we see now, of course, is the effect of disruption of American society by faceless thugs who kidnap people off streets and away from fields and factories. Children are abandoned as their parents are dragged away. The conditions in which the victims are confined are not very different from the barracoons and ships of yore. What the social and home life is for the captors has become is a topic for future study.
Thanks for this, great detail about under-represented facets of history.
You are welcome!
Why do you think there were fewer European settlers in the area of present-day Nigeria vs the area of present-day Ghana (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Coast_Euro-Africans) and 'Upper Guinea' (https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/africans-african-americans-great-britain-and-united-states-curious-history-rio-pongo-ea/)?
I'm sure settlement was limited by tropical disease-- and they certainly didn't settle in the numbers they would in more temperate climates--but it seems that the presence of European traders in some parts of West Africa gave rise to mixed-race families of middlemen (https://www.pennpress.org/9780812223958/daughters-of-the-trade/ and https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/history-in-africa/article/abs/white-roots-written-and-oral-testimony-on-the-first-mr-rogers/373DC9CAB8BEB149A6DB58E9DDB5EDED).
Fantastic question. The answer is geography.
Ghana has a longer, more accessible coastline with natural harbors, while southern Nigeria is swampy, lagoon-filled, and harder to navigate. The Niger Delta was among the deadliest environments for Europeans.
Ghana’s coast was still malarial, but less lethal. This allowed Europeans to establish forts at places like Cape Coast and Elmina Castle. Though Europeans still died, these semi-permanent bases gave rise to small Euro-African (‘mulatto’) communities. They were never more than 1K to 2K at best.
Great article!
Thanks! Hope you learned a lot!
In "Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1500-1750," Immanuel Wallerstein traces the Netherlands' Hegemony until the Dutch defeat by the British. (It took four wars). In 1618, Europe began the 30 years' war. It was one year before the infamous year that began slavery in the U.S., and cost Europe eight million lives. The Dutch have been dubiously credited as having invented capitalism.
Thanks for the suggested book! I'll definitely read it!
It's part II (of four) of Wallerstein's series. Kofi bought books 2,3&4, for me, but I haven't completed the series with the first, which covered the move from feudalism to capitalism. The author introduced the series with "World-Systems Analysis; An Introduction." It's brief and ends with an assignment on the last page: "We need first of all to try to understand clearly what is going on. We need then to make our choices about the directions in which we want the world to go. And we must finally figure out how we can act in the present so that it is likely to go in the direction we prefer. We can think of these three tasks as the intellectual, the moral, and the political tasks." Piece of cake, Prof. Wallerstein!
Into the scene of societal breakdown of the 1840s came missionaries who faced almost certain death to spread the good news of God's kingdom. They couldn't rest on ships off the coast but had to live among the people they served, facing disease and occasional violence from slavers and local potentates. Malaria was a major killer, as it is now. Disruption of America by the MAGA cult, with its racism and lawlessness is accompanied by economic stress on the middle and lower classes that reduces entropy toward the deported, even as global depression dulled the senses of the German people during Hitler's rise to power. How we read or heard about heroes who put themselves on the line for the Underground Railroad or sheltered Jews in WWII and wondered what we would do in times of social and political conflict. We have our chance now.
This website claims that a cowrie shell weighs well over a gram: https://www.thebeadchest.com/products/cowrie-shells-large
So 175K shells (inflated price for a male slave) would be more than 175 kg/386 pounds.
Doesn't seem very practical as a medium of exchange. I wonder why they didn't use gold, since it was available on the gold coast?
Great question.
The Bight of Benin (Slave Coast) isn’t the Gold Coast. The major gold deposits were in modern Ghana, not in the Slave Coast in the Niger Delta or southern Nigeria. The Niger Delta was swampy and unhealthy for Europeans, but more importantly, it simply didn’t have the same gold deposits as the Gold Coast.
To pay 386 lbs of cowries (about 175,000 shells), Europeans would divide them into bags. A standard “bag” was about 20,000 shells (~44 lbs). That means one slave cost roughly 9 bags of cowries. The Dutch and other Europeans carried these in bulk, sometimes shipping tens of tons of cowries at a time.