Coercion and Markets: reconciling economic and social explanations of slavery in precolonial West Africa, c1450-c1900

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• Gareth Austin (University of Cambridge)
• Thursday 27 November 2025, 17:15-18:45
• Lightfoot Room - St John's College.

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Though this is not much noticed in comparative and global histories of slavery, enslavement and slave trading were the main source of labour recruitment, apart from the slower process of marriage and child-rearing, in the economies of precolonial West Africa. As elsewhere in the world, first-generation slaves in African societies were mostly foreigners. Unlike the forms of slavery practised by Europeans, however, indigenous African slavery usually had an assimilative element, in that the descendants of slaves tended to be integrated into the society concerned on increasingly more equal terms over subsequent generations, with varying rates and degrees of completion. The conjunction of slave labour and partial assimilation has generated a long-running debate between ‘economic’ and ‘social’ interpretations of the institution in its West African settings. This paper aims to reconcile and integrate these traditionally rival interpretations, and to explore the economic implications. I argue that, in radical ways, it was the interaction of economic and social (and cultural and political) dimensions of slavery that was central to the history of slavery in precolonial West Africa. On the one hand, the growth in the volume of slavery and the specific uses to which slaves were put within the region cannot be explained without reference to the demand for slaves as labourers producing commodities. On the other hand, without organized coercion, and the political and ideological conditions for applying it, there could have been no slavery and no slave trade. Indeed, it will be argued here that, without such coercion, there would have been no market in labour at all in the economic conditions that prevailed in most of West Africa during this era. In other words, the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis applies in its strongest form. Moreover, the assimilative tendency in African slavery should be seen both as responding to the political circumstances of the region (the severe constraints on state formation) and, ironically, as underpinning the continuation of the internal slave trade.

This talk is part of the Core Seminar in Economic and Social History series.

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