First, the sociological unevenness between colonial and Native American communities provided an impulse for rebellion. Many among those who had been sent to work on the colonies saw in native communities alternative modes of production and ways of life that offered a better guarantee of food and freedom. When confronted with strict and onerous work regimes in the colonies, in which subsistence was barely guaranteed, migrant workers found flight and defection to indigenous communities to be a way to resist and reassert the communality and autonomy that they had been dispossessed of in England.
Thus, ‘a steady stream of English settlers’ fled colonial settlements and became
‘Anglo-Powhatans’, joining a Native American confederation ‘of small-scale societies without ownership of land, without classes, without a state’.194 In other cases, the sheer abundance of land offered the opportunity to escape and create altogether new settlements, although this often meant the active dispossession of indigenous populations.195 Other servants and slaves fleeing from colonial authorities would form more itinerant communities in the shape of bands of pirates and buccaneers.196
Second, the combination of people from sociologically different backgrounds served as the basis for resistance. Colonial transport and work presented new collaborative opportunities for the ‘rank multitude’, wherein dispossessed Irish peasants, veterans of the English Revolution, enslaved indigenous Ameri-cans and African slaves could collectively rebel against authorities. Strategies of resistance included refusal to work, sabotage of production, flight from the colonies and outright revolt. In fact, such was the collaboration among Irish and Africans in resistance movements that the ‘“Black Irish” were considered an ethnic group in Montserrat and Jamaica’.197
In short, the problem of the idle, vagrant, rebellious worker reasserted itself in the colonies, where the persistent resistance and flight of workers made the new American communities periodically unsustainable. The combination of a resistant European workforce, the decimation of the indigenous popula-tion, large tracts of vacant land, and the concomitant absence of effective state coercion meant the colonial economy soon suffered from a crisis in the supply of labour. The peculiarity of this colonial arrangement in the New World meant that the possibility of capitalist development based on a ‘free’ and waged work-force was effectively closed off.198 In fact, many initial experiments in colonial plantations failed because of the prohibitive costs of accruing ‘free’ labour.199 However, once the colonisation of the Americas had been instigated – and with it a section of the ruling class invested in developing the colonial economy – a new dynamic took hold. The making of Atlantic colonies became less about dumping surplus populations, and more about obtaining a viable supply of workers that was otherwise not forthcoming from England.200
By the 18th century, with the onset of industrialisation, population control thereby became a central concern of English economists. Whereas in the first period of colonisation, the ruling class were trying to rid themselves of the
‘rank multitude’, in the age of the factory, surplus populations became central to profitability. It was in this context that the likes of Malachy Postlethwayt, a mercantilist and propagandist for the Royal African Company, argued that ‘the provision of black labor for the colonies had distinct advantages over that of white labor. Specifically, the use of African slaves on the plantation would not depopulate Britain’.201 The turn to slavery was therefore a historically specific response to the challenges noted above that confronted the ruling class – in both Europe and America – in the 17th/18th centuries. But why African slavery?
Robin Blackburn suggests that African slaves were ‘better suited, stronger, more resilient’ than either European or Native American workers.202 On the ‘supply’
side, World-Systems approaches have often reinforced an essentially conserva-tive view of African societies as passive, and the slaves extracted from them as docile and submissive.203 For Walter Rodney, because Africa was at a ‘lower level’
of economic development than Europe, it was forced into a colonial relation in which African rulers gave up slaves in exchange for manufactured goods.204 However, such approaches mistakenly project the ‘modern’ colonial relation retrospectively back to a time in which the power balance between Europe and Africa was much less clear cut. In doing so, Africa’s ‘backwardness’ (and Europe’s ‘privilege’) is presupposed but not explained, thus reifying an other-wise historically constructed (and contested) social relation. Although the eventual long-term effects of the relations between European and African soci-eties would prove constitutive of a colonial relation and white supremacy, the colonial relation itself was not the starting point. Such explanations, whether benign or not, therefore tend to reinforce the naturalisation of black slavery, by
reproducing the idea that Africans were naturally prone to colonial subjugation and exceptionally suited to plantation work.
Consequently, it must be remembered that in the 16th century when Euro-peans first began to develop the transatlantic slave trade, West African states held numerous geopolitical and economic advantages over Europeans. Much has been made of the superior military might of Europeans, but this again tends to read a later era of colonial domination back into a historical period in which domination was not the norm. Although European states would eventually subjugate the continent from the 18th century onwards, prior to that period African states proved very effective in repelling European territorial encroach-ments.205 Moreover, in terms of trade, Europe offered very little to Africa that it did not already produce or obtain from elsewhere.206
The clearest indication of European weakness in relation to African states was their abortive attempts to establish plantations in West Africa. Such attempts failed because the Europeans were unable to subjugate and transform the communal subsistence bases of agrarian production into a privatised market-based system.207 This was largely because, unlike in the Americas, Europeans were unable to conduct extensive territorial conquests and raiding missions on the African continent until well into the 18th century. Despite holding naval advantages at sea, Europeans were unable to transfer this superiority onto the African mainland, where indigenous naval techniques proved considerably better suited to manoeuvring in, and hence protecting, riverways.208 A curious stand-off characterised the geopolitical relations between Atlantic African and European states in the 16th and 17th centuries, where the Europeans were unable to fully conquer Africans on the mainland, and the Africans failed to expel the Europeans from the coast
More in common with the Indian Ocean littoral (see Chapter 7), the expe-riences of European colonialists on the Atlantic African coast were governed by commercial activities conducted on the terms set by the African ruling classes. European merchants had to fulfil a number of local obligations to gain market entry, dealing with an array of actors including kings, state intermedi-aries, merchants, brokers, notables and producers. Their obligations included obtaining licences, or providing gifts, taxes, rent and charges. Moreover, rulers of African states often compelled Europeans to trade below fixed prices, withdraw from trade, and opened and closed markets at will.209 In some cases they actively coerced the Europeans into submission, by seizing European ships that engaged in unsanctioned trade.210 These advantages held by Atlantic African states over Europeans meant that the ‘human capacity’ of slavery had to be bought, and then employed elsewhere – in the Americas – where land was easier to obtain and the ‘local population easy to coerce’.211
When seen in this context, the slave trade should not be conceived as an external shock, designed or compelled by Europeans, but instead as a pre-existing
part of ruling class strategies for reproduction in certain African societies. The spec-ificity of the slave trade was rooted in the very unevenness that existed between European and (Atlantic) African modes of production. To be clear, slavery was widespread not because Atlantic Africa was more ‘backward’ than feudal Europe, but rather because the character of ruling class reproduction differed. While in Europe land ownership constituted the basis of private property and ruling class wealth and power as such, in Atlantic Africa quasi-communal ownership of land predominated. Therefore, ruling class reproduction was guaranteed by mecha-nisms based on the ownership and accumulation of people rather than land: head taxes, military dues and labour services, of which slavery was the most common.
Indeed, slaves constituted the primary form of private property in West African law. Hence, European contemporaries observed that local rulers and notables were predominantly wealthy in slaves rather than land, cash or goods.212
One consequence of Atlantic African slaving was that slaves occupied a social position and standard of life that was little different from European peasants or workers.213 In fact, and similar to the Ottoman state structure (see Chapter 4), slaves could often take up positions that were functionally part of the ruling class.
In the case of Songhay, Kongo and Ndongo, slaves were crucial to the centrali-sation of the ruler’s authority, acting as ‘administrators, soldiers, and even royal advisors, enjoying a great freedom of movement and elite life-styles’.214
In short, ruling class power could be reproduced and increased by accumu-lating slaves. Hence the centrality of slaves to the reproduction of the Atlantic African ruling class contained, as its precondition, an intersocietal compo-nent. Due to the predominance of quasi-communal forms of land, there was a lack of compulsion for – and outright resistance towards – the acquisition of large tracts of territory through geopolitical accumulation. Instead, West African geopolitics was governed by what might be termed biopolitical accumu-lation:215 wars aimed at acquiring slaves were ‘the exact equivalent of Eurasian wars aimed at acquiring land’.216 The accumulation of humans as a rule of reproduction in Atlantic African societies was thus central to the conflicts and raids enacted between the Kongo and Ndongo, the imperial expansion of the Songhay, and the reproduction of the Senegambian states.217 Taken together, the various factors that placed slave and slaving at the heart of ruling class reproduction made the Atlantic African ruling classes exceptionally capable of providing and sustaining a steady supply of slave labour to European colonialists.
Nonetheless, once Europeans entered the slave trade, and especially once slavery became a crucial component of ruling class reproduction in the Americas, the (geo)political composition of Atlantic Africa was radically transformed. In certain areas, such as the Gold Coast, the processes of state formation that took place in the 16th and 17th centuries were made possible by the encounter of Atlantic African societies with each other, and with Europeans. Such
interac-tions generated increasing migration, settlement and centralisation in a region where nomadic and village communities were the norm. Following the intro-duction of maize, the increased caloric capacity helped spur rapid population growth throughout regions plugged into the Atlantic trade. The Atlantic coast thus shifted from a ‘periphery’ of the ‘Sudanese center’ into ‘a center in its own right: a magnet that drew people and trade from all sides to its burgeoning
“central places”’.218
But the importance of biopolitical accumulation as a rule of reproduction, and the relatively advanced position of Atlantic African societies in other trades, meant that the import of military commodities took precedence. Europeans, who were producing firearms on an unprecedented scale, were exceptionally well placed and only too willing to take advantage. The extensive influx of European weapons into Atlantic Africa substantially reconfigured the geopol-itics of the region, and in particular the dynamic of biopolitical accumulation, changing the nature and scope of warfare. Prior to the arrival of European guns, the politically fragmented character of Atlantic Africa was relatively balanced, whereby ‘no single state was militarily stronger than its neighbors’. Warfare was instead primarily defensive, short lived and limited to ‘small-scale’ operations,
‘embracing tens rather than hundreds of square miles’.219
From the mid-17th century, with African states now plugged into dense networks of commercial-cum-military relations with Europeans, this dynamic fundamentally changed. Wars became more extensive, giving rise to a series of expansionist state formations along the Atlantic African littoral, with states such as the Denkyira, Akwamu and Asante springing up, expanding, and widening the geographical scope of slave acquisition.220 At the same time, states outside the slave trade were deprived of access to weaponry and increasingly
‘found themselves on the losing side of an arms race. Their dilemma: without firearms defence was precarious. To get muskets, there must be something to export. The only item in great demand was slaves’.221 As the capacities of states for obtaining slaves increased, societies previously outside of the transatlantic slave trade were pulled irrevocably into it, either as sources of slaves, or as slave traders themselves.222 Overall, the slave trade came to serve a dual purpose. It was the medium through which the firearms crucial to war-making could be imported, and it was also the medium through which states could shed the surplus slaves accrued from their now enhanced war-making capabilities.
The Europeans’ insatiable thirst for slave labour in the Americas, on the one side, and the subsequent reordering of African geopolitics, on the other, help explain why, from the mid-17th century onwards, there was a radical increase in the transatlantic slave trade. In the first half-century of the transatlantic slave trade, 700,000 Africans boarded boats destined for the Americas.223 The export of slaves from West Africa as a whole doubled; in some cases, as in Angola, it tripled.224 Slaving in and around Allada – which would eventually take the
title of the ‘Slave Coast’ – grew from no exports in 1500 to over 19,000 slaves per year by 1700. Parts of the Gold Coast, such as Lower Guinea, experienced a similar expansion, switching from a net importer of slaves to a net exporter in the 17th century. The expansion proved exponential, especially once the English entered the trade.225 In 1670, an average of 888 slaves were exported from the Gold Coast each year. By 1720, the average had risen to 4,708 per annum.226
By the mid-18th century this had resulted in the increasing militarisation of West African states, geopolitically destabilising the region as a whole. The expansion of slaving for export, combined with the ravages of conflict, produced a concomitant demographic exhaustion of West Africa and its tributaries. In a region where people were considered the primary source of wealth, population decline had a negative impact on agrarian productivity, which in turn increased exposure to famine and disease.227 Plundered of its source of power, wealth and international ‘comparative advantage’ – human labour – Africa was left prone to an emergent relation of subjugation and dependence vis-à-vis Europe, which would come to characterise the later ravages of colonialism on the continent.