There’s an article that I can’t find anymore about the consequences of slave-taking—in the opinion of the author, it did much more damage than colonialism.
Aside from removing large numbers of productive adults from their home societies, trust was destroyed. The only way people could get the weapons they needed to protect themselves and their families was to kidnap and sell nearby people.
Once a pattern of betrayal is established, it’s apt to be stable. The article said that regions from which many people had been taken weren’t as good at forming governments.
Nigeria was a major source of slaves.
It would be interesting to compare folk tales and proverbs from regions with more and less slave-taking.
Does this apply to all slave taking, or only when the slaves are sold to foreigners? Or only when the slaver and the slave are from the same nation/tribe/whatever?
The article is available again! It was behind a paywall for a while. It might be a different but similar article—I don’t remember the one I saw years ago having multi-colored maps.
Looking at the article again, part of the point is that slave-taking caused large social structures to fragment.
The article is specifically about the European and American taking of slaves from Africa, which was slave-taking on a huge scale.
The article is specifically about the European and American taking of slaves from Africa, which was slave-taking on a huge scale.
Er, not quite. Enslavement was almost always done by Africans, as the article points out. The difference between the West Atlantic slave trade and other slave trades was its new location (instead of the slaves having to survive a trek to the Middle East, they just needed to make it to the Atlantic coast; so you get more Nigerians shipped to America than the Middle East, and many Ethiopians sent to the Middle East but none to America) and the new magnitude (populating the new world with agricultural workers takes a lot more people than, say, harem guarding, but it’s still only twice the rest of the slave trade, and it started way later). It’s not clear to me that the absolute numbers are more meaningful than per capita numbers- there was pretty significant population growth from 600 to 1800- but the article is otherwise solid.
Semi-fair point—the slaves were directly taken by Africans (leading to huge losses of social capital), but the money, trade goods, and ultimate threat (if you don’t sell your neighbors, you can’t get weapons to protect yourself) came from Europeans and Americans.
ultimate threat (if you don’t sell your neighbors, you can’t get weapons to protect yourself) came from Europeans and Americans.
The section on causation (5.1 in particular) seems to suggest the other direction. The areas that were not up to trading with Europeans- the ones that didn’t have national currencies, economic institutions, lower population density, etc.- were less touched by slavery, because they’d just attack Portuguese traders who sailed up (because raiding is how you say hello to foreigners). And when you’re a Kongo businessman willing to sell Africans to the Portuguese, it’s way cheaper to abduct fellow Kongo than to mount an expedition into Gabon.
It is noteworthy that European slave purchasers would stir up civil wars because those would increase the number of slaves for sale- but I’m not sure I would call that the ultimate threat. For places like Nigeria, for example, there had already been almost a thousand years of Nigerians enslaving other Nigerians for sale to foreigners- and so I wouldn’t call the Europeans the ultimate threat. (Indeed, until the Americas were colonized, Europeans had little use for African slaves.)
There’s an article that I can’t find anymore about the consequences of slave-taking—in the opinion of the author, it did much more damage than colonialism.
Aside from removing large numbers of productive adults from their home societies, trust was destroyed. The only way people could get the weapons they needed to protect themselves and their families was to kidnap and sell nearby people.
Once a pattern of betrayal is established, it’s apt to be stable. The article said that regions from which many people had been taken weren’t as good at forming governments.
Nigeria was a major source of slaves.
It would be interesting to compare folk tales and proverbs from regions with more and less slave-taking.
Does this apply to all slave taking, or only when the slaves are sold to foreigners? Or only when the slaver and the slave are from the same nation/tribe/whatever?
The article is available again! It was behind a paywall for a while. It might be a different but similar article—I don’t remember the one I saw years ago having multi-colored maps.
Looking at the article again, part of the point is that slave-taking caused large social structures to fragment.
The article is specifically about the European and American taking of slaves from Africa, which was slave-taking on a huge scale.
Er, not quite. Enslavement was almost always done by Africans, as the article points out. The difference between the West Atlantic slave trade and other slave trades was its new location (instead of the slaves having to survive a trek to the Middle East, they just needed to make it to the Atlantic coast; so you get more Nigerians shipped to America than the Middle East, and many Ethiopians sent to the Middle East but none to America) and the new magnitude (populating the new world with agricultural workers takes a lot more people than, say, harem guarding, but it’s still only twice the rest of the slave trade, and it started way later). It’s not clear to me that the absolute numbers are more meaningful than per capita numbers- there was pretty significant population growth from 600 to 1800- but the article is otherwise solid.
Semi-fair point—the slaves were directly taken by Africans (leading to huge losses of social capital), but the money, trade goods, and ultimate threat (if you don’t sell your neighbors, you can’t get weapons to protect yourself) came from Europeans and Americans.
The section on causation (5.1 in particular) seems to suggest the other direction. The areas that were not up to trading with Europeans- the ones that didn’t have national currencies, economic institutions, lower population density, etc.- were less touched by slavery, because they’d just attack Portuguese traders who sailed up (because raiding is how you say hello to foreigners). And when you’re a Kongo businessman willing to sell Africans to the Portuguese, it’s way cheaper to abduct fellow Kongo than to mount an expedition into Gabon.
It is noteworthy that European slave purchasers would stir up civil wars because those would increase the number of slaves for sale- but I’m not sure I would call that the ultimate threat. For places like Nigeria, for example, there had already been almost a thousand years of Nigerians enslaving other Nigerians for sale to foreigners- and so I wouldn’t call the Europeans the ultimate threat. (Indeed, until the Americas were colonized, Europeans had little use for African slaves.)