In Europe, precolonial West Africa is probably most associated with the Atlantic and Saharan slave trades. Slave labour also became central to the economies of West African societies themselves: a recent study asserted that by 1850 half the population of the largest nineteenth-century state, the Sokoto Caliphate, consisted of slaves. This lecture will explore the history of slavery within West Africa, addressing three problems.

First, while there was huge demand for manual labour in the plantation systems of the early modern Americas, labour was also scarce in relation to cultivable land in West Africa itself. Given also the costs of enslavement and transportation, why then was the Atlantic (and Saharan) slave trade profitable to the perpetrators, over hundreds of years?

Second, West Africa in the fifteenth to early twentieth centuries is a good example of the general observation that, unlike with the other major categories of labour coercion  -serfdom, debt bondage or corvée-  those enslaved were usually foreigners in their masters’ societies. Why was enslavement overwhelmingly a fate reserved for outsiders?

Third, of all the forms of labour coercion, slavery is arguably the most market-oriented. What were the relationships between slave trading, slave labour, and the growing commercialisation of West Africa, including after abolition?

For all three questions, I will argue that the answers have to be partly economic and environmental (resources and technologies), and partly political (relating to the constraints and opportunities for state formation in the region, and the incentives to rulers).