JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Boston University African Studies Center and Board of Trustees, Boston University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies. Horses, and in particular horses supplied by the Portuguese, may well have played the role of a catalyst in the political changes taking place in Senegambia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It has been suggested that the overseas supply of horses through the Atlantic trade may not only have changed the character of warfare in the region, but that it also resulted in a disruption of the existing balance of power and in the decline of the Jolof Empire, the main political body in the area. The supply of horses was first linked to the downfall of Jolof by Jean Boulegue, in his pioneering thesis on fifteenth-century Senegambia.1 Boulegue was also the first to point out a connection between the political fortunes of Senegalese states and their access to European trade goods. Recently, developing this hypothesis further, he has suggested a link between acces to horses and the pre-European strength of the northern Senegalese states, and tied their weakening to a redistribution of supply in favour of Kajoor, Siin and Saalum.2 In this, Boulegue is not alone:3 Philip D. Curtin,4 Jean Suret-Canale, and Boubacar Barry,5 also considered horses and their *I would like to express my gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose generous support in the form of doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships made possible much of the research for this article. Software limitations at the journal made it necessary to omit most Arabic accents and to replace some old Portuguese accents by letter equivalents; interventions are marked by square brackets, e.g. nenhuu[m]. 1 J. Boulegue, "La Senegambie du milieu du XVe siecle au debut du XVIIe siecle" (These, 3eme cycle, Universite de Paris, 1969), 203-204. 2 J. Boulegue, Le Grand Jolof (XIIe-XVIe siecle) (Paris, 1987), 75, 153, 155, 162, 166. 3 A critical synthesis of such views is found in Robin Law, The Horse in West African History: The Role of the Horse in the Societies of Pre-colonial West Africa (London, 1980), 178. 4 In 1975, Philip Curtin mentioned access to remounts as one of the contributing factors in the destabilization of Jolof (Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1975), 11). The observation was only a marginal remark, but is frequently quoted by other scholars and therefore has had considerable impact. 5 Suret-Canale and Barry considered the trade in horses an aspect of the negative impact of the Portuguese presence on Senegambian history (J. S...

ALTHOUGH slaves were the most common merchandise in the Portuguese-dominated opening period of the seaborne trade between Europe and Africa, relatively little conclusive information is available on their overall numbers. Even less is known about the distribution of these early exports of slaves in space and time, although these are two of the key factors in assessing the much debated societal impact of the early Atlantic slave trade and the role of slavery in West and West-Central African economic, social and political life.

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