THE EARLY HISTORY OF EUROPEAN TRADE WITH AFRICA

The marketing of people in the interior of Africa predates European contact with West Africa. A Trans-Saharan slave trade developed from the 10th to 14th century which featured the buying and selling of African captives in Islamic markets such as the area around present-day Sudan. A ma

There was a complex system of exchange between European, Afro-European, and African agents. Bundles, or "assortments," of European trading goods were traded for a specified number of African units of exchange, which then were exchanged for a specified number of slaves. The units of exchange varied regionally in Africa and included European iron bars, cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean, Italian beads, blue-dyed Indian textiles, or Brazilian gold. In the late 18th century, an assortment of European textiles, firearms, and alcohol would, for example, be equivalent to 12 ounces of gold along the Gold Coast; 12 ounces of gold would be the "price" of an adult male African slave. The profitability of a slave voyage often depended upon the ability of a merchant or captain to "assort" his trading goods to meet short-term African demand. There were many coastal agents who traded with slave-ship captains who did not have a properly "assorted" cargo. Many of these agents, particularly those who lived on the coast from present-day Guinea-Bissau southeast to Liberia, were of Afro-European descent.

Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of the New World in 1492 marked the beginning of a transatlantic trading system. Via the slave trade, Africans played a leading role in the creation and evolution of this large and long-lasting "Atlantic system." Spanish adventurers arrived in the Americas hoping to trade for riches but soon enslaved the Native American peoples in their search for gold and silver. Disease, malnutrition, and Spanish atrocities led to the deaths of millions of the Indians of the Americas. By the 1520s the depopulation of the region prompted the Spanish government to look for alternative sources of labor. Officials contracted with Portuguese merchants to deliver Africans to Spanish territories in the New World. The first transatlantic slave voyages from Africa to the Americas occurred in the early 1520s on Portuguese vessels sailing from West Africa to the large Caribbean island of Hispaniola, the earliest European name for present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Some topics in this essay:
Passage Officers, Bonny Calabar, Indian- European-produced, Middle Passage, Caribbean Recent, Occasionally Africans, Windward Coast, Americas African, North America, Nigeria African, slave trade, slave vessels, transatlantic slave, transatlantic slave trade, african captives, 19th century, west africa, 18th century, gold coast, slaves sold, middle passage, slave vessels sailed, biafra gold coast, british north america, bight biafra gold,