Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade, and Slavery in Atlantic Africa

Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade, and Slavery in Atlantic Africa. Edited by Robin Law, Suzanne Schwartz, and Silke Strickrodt. Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2013. Pp. xv, 272. $90.00.This wonderful book transcends its origins as individual papers presented at a conference at the German Historical Institute (London) in September 2010. Rather than a mere anthology of proceedings, what the authors and the editors have created here is a cohesive presentation of new case studies, valuable syntheses of historiography and theory, and provocative new questions about transformations of political economy along Africa's Atlantic littoral and neighboring inland regions from the early sixteenth to twentieth centuries. This is much more expansive in reach-in geography and chronology-than typical studies of "legitimate" commerce, where the focus has been traditionally limited to nineteenth-century coastal Atlantic Africa north of the equator.This subfield of African history has always thrived in localized case studies since Kenneth Dike's pioneering work published in 1954 on the coastal Niger Delta in 1800s. At issue, then as now, are the causes and outcomes of transitions in Africa after the export in human chattel was made illegal by Western European powers and the United States and thereafter militarily suppressed. These case studies have supported broader questions about the relationships between Africa and its neighbors in the very long run of history.The editors' introduction to the volume's eleven chapters is nothing short of excellent. It traces the development of the scholarly subfield through the case studies beginning with Dike and then extending to syntheses from Anthony Hopkins (1973), Ralph Austen (1987), and this volume's own editor-contributor, Robin Law (1995). Illuminated is terminology of the field itself (i.e., "legitimate"), and there is an interesting engagement with Hopkins in the text and supporting notes. This introduction earns the status of required reading.The first five chapters explore the significance of agriculture in Africa to supporting the export trade in slaves through provisioning and then the possibility of production in Africa of farmed produce, increasingly in non-edible raw materials, as an alternative to commercial regimes dependent on trans-Atlantic exile of workers. Emphasized in these chapters are the contemporary components of success in commercial farming, including control of access to arable land, coercion of labor, and lawful use of violence against those who would not toil. Here Gerhard Seibert's contribution on Sao Tome and Principe as the "first plantation economy in tropics," and the revolt there in 1595, foreshadows Africans' disruption of slave-based commercial systems in later centuries across the ocean. David Eltis and Toby Green describe the production of grain (rice, millet, maize) as more than just a parallel economic sector in the era of slaving. Instead, the profitability of the export trade in people rested precariously on the production of food for perishable human inventories.Another six chapters describe the relationship between imperial powers and freed persons in the agricultural sectors of Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Gold Coast, and Angola. …