Labour and Living Standards in Pre-Colonial West Africa

Rönnbäck, Klas

doi:10.4324/9781315622156

Cited by 7 publications

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“…The paper will study the barter transactions at the micro-level between a European Company, the RAC, and African counterparts on the Gold Coast during the first half of the eighteenth century. It thereby extends previous research by Klas Rönnbäck (2014Rönnbäck ( , 2016 into the trade in this region by analysing this trade in greater detail. In the accounts of the RAC from this period of time, it is possible to find empirical data on individual barter transactions, or transactions summarized over shorter periods of time (e.g.…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 75%

The business of barter on the pre-colonial Gold Coast

Rönnbäck

2020

Economic History of Developing Regions

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Trade on the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century was dominated by non-monetized barter trade. In this paper, a large dataset of barter transactions are used to study the social embeddedness of the trade. The data shows that prestige goods such as alcohol to a disproportionate degree were exchanged for other prestige goods such as gold. Gunsbut also cheaper types of textileswere to a disproportionate degree exchanged for slaves in particular. The evidence thus helps to shed light on the social valuation of various imported commodities on the Gold Coast at this time.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 75%

The business of barter on the pre-colonial Gold Coast

Rönnbäck

2020

Economic History of Developing Regions

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“…This assumption informed the estimates ofEltis (2013),Klein and Engerman (1979) andRönnbäck (2015) and is also put forth in other key studies such asCarney and Rosomoff (2011, p47) andMandelblatt (2008, pp411, 421). In his study of the Danish slave trade on the Gold Coast Hernaes (1998, p337) even claimed that it was impossible to bring sufficient food supplies from Europe and that the 'millie trade' (maize) must therefore have given a major impulse to the local Gold Coast economy.…”

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confidence: 53%

“…22 Research on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was greatly aided by the four volume transcription 21 A notable exception would be the work of Rönnbäck on economic change along the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century. See in particular Rönnbäck (2014Rönnbäck ( , 2015 The RAC continued operating until 1752 when the business was officially wound up by an act of parliament and its assets transferred to the Africa Company of Merchants (Pettigrew 2013, p176).…”

Section: Data and Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The resultant analysis suggests that, although the 25% estimate appears valid for the period up to the 1740s, this is far too high for the period 1750-1808, when the trade grew to its peak. Rönnbäck (2015) has made the valid point that any measurement of effective slave trade related demand should be assessed against the existing size of domestic African food markets. Without bringing in any new data, but by adopting some baseline assumptions, he estimated the demand effect at the Gold Coast may have ranged between 3-4% of total agricultural production and 27% of total urban demand (2015, p166).…”

Section: Did the Transatlantic Slave Trade Boost West African Commercial Agriculture?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A comparative history of commercial transition in three West African slave trading economies, 1630 to 1860

Dalrymple-Smith¹

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Map 1.1. Major coastal regions from which captives left Africa, all years………….….……24 Map 1.2. Enlarged section from Postlethwayt's 1755 map showing the three case study regions, boundaries marked……………………………………....………………………..…25 Map 5.1. Expansion of the Asante state 1700-1807……………………………………...…114 Map 5.2. Principal alluvial gold mining areas: eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (shaded) and major kola producing areas in Asante (inside the black circle)……………………...…115 Map 5.3. The great roads of Asante……………………...…………….……………………123 Map 6.1. Approximate regions of 'Igboland' + principle ports…………………..…………144 Map 6.2. Trade routes from the interior to the coast in the Bight of Biafra…….……......…147 Map 7.1. The kingdom of Dahomey and its immediate neighbours……...…………………184 ABOLITION AND THE COMMERCIAL TRANSITION IN WEST AFRICAIn 1842, the author of a British Parliamentary Report on West Africa and the state of the slave trade 1 stated that: "...a trade in produce has been gradually growing up and gaining upon the Slave Trade in proportion as the enterprise of the British merchant pushes on the one and the vigilance of the British cruiser checks and cripples the other..." The report was written 35 years after the passing of the 'Abolition Bill' by parliament in 1807, which outlawed participation in the transatlantic slave trade for British merchants. This trade had begun in the late fifteenth century by the Portuguese, who required labour for their expanding Atlantic and American empires. By the late eighteenth century it had reached its apogee in West Africa 2 with thousands of captives embarked annually onto European and American vessels and sent to labour in the plantations and mines of the New World. At first, Britain was the only major slave trading nation to cease their involvement in the traffic of African captives to the Americas. 3 They were eventually joined, often unwillingly, by the French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese/Brazilians following a long diplomatic and military campaign which finally halted the traffic by the 1860s.The 1807 Bill was the result of a sustained campaign by what became known as the abolitionist movement. This had begun in the eighteenth century and was a product of a changing intellectual and religious climate. Writers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau argued that slavery was in principal contrary to human nature, 4 and Adam Smith argued in the 'Wealth of Nations' (1776) that wage labour was more economically productive to society than coerced labour. In fact, Klein (2010, p190) has argued that it was this, rather than humanitarian concerns for the African victims of the trade, that drove the movement: "The anti-slave-trade campaign was based fundamentally on a belief in free labour as one of the most crucial underpinnings of modern society and the institution that guaranteed mankind's progress out of its medieval past." However, the campaign did have a profoundly moral side, especially for dissenting Protestant movements, such as the Quakers and Methodists who were among the first t...

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“…When colonial empires entered sub-Saharan territories in the late nineteenth century in the "scramble for Africa", 2 many of the colonized peoples had never encountered paid work. Although waged labour had been present in Western Africa long before European colonization and non-slave labour played a secondary role in the provision of labour even at the height of the slave trade (Cooper 2017, 142), the slavery induced by the European colonization of the Americas and the labour of enslaved persons dominated the older complex societies of the region (Rönnbäck 2016). Whether characterized as the "slave mode of production" (see Lovejoy 2012, 267-271) -especially in northern territories -or found among craftsmen and in subsistence economies, the habitus of wage labourers had hardly been developed beyond parts of today's South Africa and precolonial cities (Hailey 1938 and1957).…”

Section: How To Find Wage Earners For the Construction Of Labour Marketsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal segmentation and early colonialism in sub‐Saharan Africa: Informality and the colonial exploitative legal employment standard

Fechner

2022

International Labour Review

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Labour markets in sub‐Saharan Africa are characterized by a gendered division between formal and informal sectors. This article argues that this division originates from a rationality introduced by racist and gendered colonial legal segmentation, produced by a variety of legal regimes in and beyond employment law. Labour market segmentation in postcolonial settings cannot be understood or overcome without analysing the specific colonial institutional origins of the commodification of labour. In sub‐Saharan Africa, the “colonial exploitative legal employment standard” that commodified labour focused on black African male employees for European employers, excluding or marginalizing women and domestic labour relations.

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Labour and Living Standards in Pre-Colonial West Africa

Cited by 7 publications

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The business of barter on the pre-colonial Gold Coast

The business of barter on the pre-colonial Gold Coast

A comparative history of commercial transition in three West African slave trading economies, 1630 to 1860

Legal segmentation and early colonialism in sub‐Saharan Africa: Informality and the colonial exploitative legal employment standard

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