Economic history of Africa
Encyclopedia
Humanity originated in Africa
, and as soon as human societies existed so did economic activity. Earliest humans were hunter gatherers living in small, family groupings. Even then there was considerable trade that could cover long distances. Archaeologists have found that evidence of trade in luxury items like precious metals and shells across the entirety of the continent.
, sorghum
and cowpea
s, which spread through West Africa
and the Sahel
. The Sahara at this time was like the Sahel today. Its wide open fields made cultivation easy, but the poor soil and limited rain made intensive farming impossible. The local crops were also not ideal and produced fewer calories than those of other regions. These factors limited surpluses and kept populations sparse and scattered.
North Africa
took a very different route from the southern regions. Climatically it is closely linked to the Middle East
and the Fertile Crescent
, and the agricultural techniques of that region were adopted wholesale. This included a very different sets of crops, such as wheat
, barley
, and grapes. North Africa was also blessed by one of the richest agricultural regions in the world in the Nile River valley. With the arrival of agriculture, the Nile region quickly became one of the most densely populated areas in the world, and the Egypt
home to one of the first civilizations.
The drying of the Sahara created a formidable barrier between the northern and southern portions of the continent. Two important exceptions were Nubia
, which was linked to Egypt by the Nile and Ethiopia
, which could trade with the northern regions over the Red Sea
. Powerful states grew up in these regions such as Kush
in Nubia and Axum
in Ethiopia. From these regions ideas and technologies from the Middle East and Europe reached Sub-Saharan Africa.
One of these was knowledge of iron
working that arrived, presumably from Sudan, around 1200 BC and quickly spread to West Africa and reached South Africa
by the fifth century AD. Some historians believe that iron working may have been developed independently in Africa. Unlike other continents Africa did not have a period of copper
and bronze
working before their Iron Age
. Copper is quite rare in Africa while iron is quite common. In Nubia and Ethiopia, iron, trade, and agricultural surpluses lead to the establishment of cities and civilizations.
speaking peoples. The Bantu expansion began in Southern Cameroon around 4000 years ago. Bantu languages are spoken there today and there is archaeological evidence for incoming Neolithic farmers in Northern Gabon ca. 3800 BP. It is known that Bantu expansion was extremely rapid and massive, but its exact engine remains controversial. This period predated iron, which appears in the archaeological record by 2500 BP.
One of the early expansions of Bantu was the migration of the Bubi
to Fernando Po (Bioko). They were still using stone technology at first European contact. The difficulties of cutting down the equatorial forest for farming have led to the suggestion that the primary expansion was along river valleys, a hypothesis supported by studies of fish names. Another factor may have been the arrival of southeast-Asian food crops, notably the AAB plantain, the cocoyam
and the water-yam. Linguistic reconstructions suggest that the only livestock possessed by the proto-Bantu was the goat. Over the centuries the entire southern half of Africa was covered with the group, excluding only the Kalahari desert. Their expansion only ended relatively recently. In the year 1000, Arab traders described that the Bantu had not reached as far as Mozambique
, and European settlers observed the Bantu expansion into South Africa under the Zulu and others.
The importation Bantu pastoralism reshaped the continent's economy. Sometime in the first millennium and equally important change began as crops began to arrive from Southeast Asia
. The Indian Ocean
has always been far more open to trade than the turbulent Atlantic and Pacific. Traders could ride the monsoon
winds west early in the year and return east on them later. It is guessed that these crops first arrived in Madagascar
, which also adopted Southeast Asian languages, sometime between AD 300 and 800. From the island the crops crossed to East Africa. They included many crops, the most important being the banana
.
The banana and other crops allowed for more intensive cultivation in the tropical regions of Africa, this was most notable in the Great Lakes region, and area with excellent soil, that saw many cities and states form, their populations being fed largely by bananas.
becoming their most important city. The Greeks
controlled much of the eastern trade, including along the Red Sea with Ethiopia. In this region a number of Greek trading cities that were established acted as a conduit for their civilization and learning.
The Egyptian (and later, Roman
) city of Alexandria
(founded by Alexander the Great in 334 BC
), was one of the hubs for Mediterranean trade for many centuries. Well into the 19th century Egypt remained one of the most developed parts of the world outside of Europe.
For most of the first millennium AD, the Axumite Kingdom in Ethiopia
and Eritrea
had a powerful navy and trading links reaching as far as the Byzantine Empire
and India
. Between the 14th and 17th centuries, the Ajuuraan State
centered in modern-day Somalia
practiced hydraulic engineering
and developed new systems for agriculture
and taxation, which continued to be used in parts of the Horn of Africa
as late as the 19th century.
In Southeast Africa, Swahili Kingdoms
created a prosperous trade empire, where occupied the territory of modern-day Kenya
, Tanzania
and Uganda
. Swahili cities were important trading ports for trade with the Middle East and Far East.
In the interior of Africa, trade was far more limited. Low population densities made profitable commerce difficult. The massive barrier of the Congo
rainforests were more imposing than the Sahara, blocking trade through the center of the continent.
It was the arrival of the Islam
ic armies that transformed the economies of much of Africa. Though Islam had comparatively little impact on North Africa where large cities, literacy, and centralized states had been the norm, Muslims were far more effective at penetrating the Sahara than Christians had been. This was largely due to the camel
, which had carried the Arab expansion and would soon after carried large amounts of trade across the desert.
Thus a series of states developed in the Sahel
on the southern edge of the Sahara which made immense profits from trading across the Sahara. The first of these was the Kingdom of Ghana, reaching it peak in the twelfth century. Soon, others such as the Mali Empire
and Kanem-Bornu
, also arose in the region. The main trade of these states was gold
, which was plentiful in Guinea
. Also important was the trans-Saharan slave trade that shipped large numbers of slaves to North Africa.
On the east coast of the continent, an equally important trade was developing as Swahili
traders linked the region into an Indian Ocean trading network, bringing imports of Chinese
pottery and India
n fabrics in exchange for gold, ivory
, and slaves.
in Europe. Previously, trade with Sub-Saharan Africa could only be conducted through North African middlemen. Now Europeans could trade directly with the Africans themselves.
The first to arrive were the Portuguese
, who began significant trading with West Africa in the fifteenth century. This trade was primarily for the same commodities the Arabs had bought—gold, ivory, and slaves. The Portuguese sold the Africans Indian cloth and European manufactured goods but refused to sell them guns. Soon, however, other European powers such as France
, Denmark
, the Netherlands
and Britain
were developing their own trade with Africa, and they had fewer restrictions.
This valuable trade lead to rapid change in West Africa. The region had long been agriculturally productive and, especially in western Nigeria, densely populated. The massive profits from trade and the arrival of guns lead to significant centralization and a number of states formed in the region such as the Ashanti Confederacy and Kingdom of Benin. These states became some of the wealthiest and most advanced in Africa. Wealthy merchants began to send their children to European universities and their well armed standing armies could challenge European forces.
Many West-African natives, such as Seedies and Kroomen
, served on European ships, and received regular pay, which greatly enhanced their status back home.
Clearly, the slave trade enriched the segments of African society that traded in slaves. However, the modern historiography of slavery has swung between two poles on the question of its demographic and economic effects on Africa as a whole. Early historical accounts of the Atlantic slave trade were largely written for a popular audience by abolitionists and former slaves like Olaudah Equiano
who emphasized its profoundly negative effects on African peoples. As the 19th century progressed, accounts of the negative impact of slavery were increasingly used to argue for European colonization of the continent. Conversely, there were those, like the British explorer and geographer William Winwood Reade, who drew on the accounts of slave traders to argue that the effects of slavery were positive.
By the early 20th century, the view of slavery as a negative influence on Africa prevailed among professional academic historians in Europe and the United States. During the decolonization period following World War II, an influential group of scholars, led by J.D. Fage, argued that the negative effects of slavery had been exaggerated, and that the export of slaves had been offset by population growth. Walter Rodney
, a specialist on the Upper Guinea Coast, countered that European demand for slaves had vastly increased the economic importance of the slave trade in West Africa, with catastrophic effects. Rodney, who was active in Pan-African independence movements, accused Fage of whitewashing the role of Europeans in Africa; Fage responded by accusing Rodney of nationalist romanticism.
Debates on the economic impacts of the Atlantic trade were further stimulated by the publication of Philip Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), which argued that 9.566 million slaves were exported from Africa through the Atlantic trade. In the 1970s, the debate on the economic impacts of the Atlantic trade increasingly turned on demographic estimates of slave exports in relation to continental birth rates. Most scholars now believe that Curtin was too conservative in his calculation, with most estimates ranging between 11.5 million to 15.4 million. More recently, John K. Thornton has presented an argument closer to that of Fage, while Joseph Inikori, Patrick Manning and Nathan Nunn have argued that the slave trade had a long-term debilitating impact on African economic development. Manning, for example, arrived at the following conclusion, after accounting for regional variations in slave exports and assuming an annual African population growth rate of 0.5.%: the population of Africa would have been 100 million rather than 50 million in 1850, if not for the combined effects of the external and internal slave trades. Nunn, in a recent econometric analysis of slave-exporting regions in all parts of Africa, found "a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves taken from a country and its subsequent economic development." Nunn argues, moreover, that this cannot be explained by poverty prior to the slave trade, because more densely populated and economically developed parts of Africa regressed behind previously less developed, non-slave exporting areas during the course of the Atlantic, trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades.
had fallen by as much as 50%, or from roughly 20 million to 10 million people, under Belgian rule as a result of forced labor (largely for the purposes of rubber cultivation), massacre by colonial troops, famine and disease. In white settler colonies like Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa and Southwest Africa (now Namibia), the most fertile lands were forcibly expropriated from the indigenous populations for use by white settlers. African farmers were pushed onto "native reserves," usually located on arid, marginal lands. In German Southwest Africa, somewhere between 25,000 and 100,000 Hereros were killed either resisting land expropriation by white settlers, or by starvation in the desert where they were exiled. The legacy of these land expropriations remains in Africa today, as over 80% of the arable land in both South Africa and Namibia remains white-owned.
Today, many African economies suffer from the legacy of colonialism. In addition to taking millions of Africans out of the continent, European countries neglected to build adequate infrastructure in Africa. In agriculture, the plantation systems that they introduced were highly unsustainable and caused severe environmental degradation. For example, cotton severely lowers soil fertility wherever it is grown, and areas of West Africa that are dominated by cotton plantations are now unable to switch to more profitable crops or even to produce food because or the depleted soil. Recently, more countries have initiated programs to revert to traditional, sustainable forms of agriculture such as shifting cultivation and bush fallow in order to grow enough food to support the population while maintaining soil fertility which allows agriculture to continue in future generations. (Gyasi)
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
, and as soon as human societies existed so did economic activity. Earliest humans were hunter gatherers living in small, family groupings. Even then there was considerable trade that could cover long distances. Archaeologists have found that evidence of trade in luxury items like precious metals and shells across the entirety of the continent.
Origins of agriculture
The first optimist actor world war 1000000 of agriculture in Africa are began in the heart of the Sahara Desert, which in 5200 BC was far more moist and denselied populated. Several native species were domesticated, most importantly pearl milletPearl millet
Pearl millet is the most widely grown type of millet. Grown in Africa and the Indian subcontinent since prehistoric times, it is generally accepted that pearl millet originated in Africa and was subsequently introduced into India. The center of diversity, and suggested area of domestication, for...
, sorghum
Sorghum
Sorghum is a genus of numerous species of grasses, one of which is raised for grain and many of which are used as fodder plants either cultivated or as part of pasture. The plants are cultivated in warmer climates worldwide. Species are native to tropical and subtropical regions of all continents...
and cowpea
Cowpea
The Cowpea is one of several species of the widely cultivated genus Vigna. Four cultivated subspecies are recognised:*Vigna unguiculata subsp. cylindrica Catjang...
s, which spread through West Africa
West Africa
West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of the African continent. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Western Africa includes the following 16 countries and an area of approximately 5 million square km:-Flags of West Africa:...
and the Sahel
Sahel
The Sahel is the ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition between the Sahara desert in the North and the Sudanian Savannas in the south.It stretches across the North African continent between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea....
. The Sahara at this time was like the Sahel today. Its wide open fields made cultivation easy, but the poor soil and limited rain made intensive farming impossible. The local crops were also not ideal and produced fewer calories than those of other regions. These factors limited surpluses and kept populations sparse and scattered.
North Africa
North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...
took a very different route from the southern regions. Climatically it is closely linked to the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
and the Fertile Crescent
Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent, nicknamed "The Cradle of Civilization" for the fact the first civilizations started there, is a crescent-shaped region containing the comparatively moist and fertile land of otherwise arid and semi-arid Western Asia. The term was first used by University of Chicago...
, and the agricultural techniques of that region were adopted wholesale. This included a very different sets of crops, such as wheat
Wheat
Wheat is a cereal grain, originally from the Levant region of the Near East, but now cultivated worldwide. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize and rice...
, barley
Barley
Barley is a major cereal grain, a member of the grass family. It serves as a major animal fodder, as a base malt for beer and certain distilled beverages, and as a component of various health foods...
, and grapes. North Africa was also blessed by one of the richest agricultural regions in the world in the Nile River valley. With the arrival of agriculture, the Nile region quickly became one of the most densely populated areas in the world, and the Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
home to one of the first civilizations.
The drying of the Sahara created a formidable barrier between the northern and southern portions of the continent. Two important exceptions were Nubia
Nubia
Nubia is a region along the Nile river, which is located in northern Sudan and southern Egypt.There were a number of small Nubian kingdoms throughout the Middle Ages, the last of which collapsed in 1504, when Nubia became divided between Egypt and the Sennar sultanate resulting in the Arabization...
, which was linked to Egypt by the Nile and Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
, which could trade with the northern regions over the Red Sea
Red Sea
The Red Sea is a seawater inlet of the Indian Ocean, lying between Africa and Asia. The connection to the ocean is in the south through the Bab el Mandeb strait and the Gulf of Aden. In the north, there is the Sinai Peninsula, the Gulf of Aqaba, and the Gulf of Suez...
. Powerful states grew up in these regions such as Kush
Kingdom of Kush
The native name of the Kingdom was likely kaš, recorded in Egyptian as .The name Kash is probably connected to Cush in the Hebrew Bible , son of Ham ....
in Nubia and Axum
Axum
Axum or Aksum is a city in northern Ethiopia which was the original capital of the eponymous kingdom of Axum. Population 56,500 . Axum was a naval and trading power that ruled the region from ca. 400 BC into the 10th century...
in Ethiopia. From these regions ideas and technologies from the Middle East and Europe reached Sub-Saharan Africa.
One of these was knowledge of iron
Iron
Iron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...
working that arrived, presumably from Sudan, around 1200 BC and quickly spread to West Africa and reached South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
by the fifth century AD. Some historians believe that iron working may have been developed independently in Africa. Unlike other continents Africa did not have a period of copper
Copper
Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu and atomic number 29. It is a ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. Pure copper is soft and malleable; an exposed surface has a reddish-orange tarnish...
and bronze
Bronze
Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...
working before their Iron Age
Iron Age
The Iron Age is the archaeological period generally occurring after the Bronze Age, marked by the prevalent use of iron. The early period of the age is characterized by the widespread use of iron or steel. The adoption of such material coincided with other changes in society, including differing...
. Copper is quite rare in Africa while iron is quite common. In Nubia and Ethiopia, iron, trade, and agricultural surpluses lead to the establishment of cities and civilizations.
The Bantu expansion
In the even more sparsely settled areas continent this same period saw the expansion of the BantuBantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
speaking peoples. The Bantu expansion began in Southern Cameroon around 4000 years ago. Bantu languages are spoken there today and there is archaeological evidence for incoming Neolithic farmers in Northern Gabon ca. 3800 BP. It is known that Bantu expansion was extremely rapid and massive, but its exact engine remains controversial. This period predated iron, which appears in the archaeological record by 2500 BP.
One of the early expansions of Bantu was the migration of the Bubi
Bubi
The Bubi people, also known as Voove, Pove, Bobes, Boobes, Boobees, Boobies, Boubies, Adeeyahs,Adeejahs, Adijas, Ediyas, Eris, Fernando Poans, Fernandians, and Bantu Speaking Bubi, are an African ethnic group of the Bantu group, who are indigenous to Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea...
to Fernando Po (Bioko). They were still using stone technology at first European contact. The difficulties of cutting down the equatorial forest for farming have led to the suggestion that the primary expansion was along river valleys, a hypothesis supported by studies of fish names. Another factor may have been the arrival of southeast-Asian food crops, notably the AAB plantain, the cocoyam
Cocoyam
Cocoyam can mean:* Taro - old cocoyam* Malanga - new cocoyam...
and the water-yam. Linguistic reconstructions suggest that the only livestock possessed by the proto-Bantu was the goat. Over the centuries the entire southern half of Africa was covered with the group, excluding only the Kalahari desert. Their expansion only ended relatively recently. In the year 1000, Arab traders described that the Bantu had not reached as far as Mozambique
Mozambique
Mozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique , is a country in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west and Swaziland and South Africa to the southwest...
, and European settlers observed the Bantu expansion into South Africa under the Zulu and others.
The importation Bantu pastoralism reshaped the continent's economy. Sometime in the first millennium and equally important change began as crops began to arrive from Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...
. The Indian Ocean
Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean is the third largest of the world's oceanic divisions, covering approximately 20% of the water on the Earth's surface. It is bounded on the north by the Indian Subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula ; on the west by eastern Africa; on the east by Indochina, the Sunda Islands, and...
has always been far more open to trade than the turbulent Atlantic and Pacific. Traders could ride the monsoon
Monsoon
Monsoon is traditionally defined as a seasonal reversing wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation, but is now used to describe seasonal changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with the asymmetric heating of land and sea...
winds west early in the year and return east on them later. It is guessed that these crops first arrived in Madagascar
Madagascar
The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa...
, which also adopted Southeast Asian languages, sometime between AD 300 and 800. From the island the crops crossed to East Africa. They included many crops, the most important being the banana
Banana
Banana is the common name for herbaceous plants of the genus Musa and for the fruit they produce. Bananas come in a variety of sizes and colors when ripe, including yellow, purple, and red....
.
The banana and other crops allowed for more intensive cultivation in the tropical regions of Africa, this was most notable in the Great Lakes region, and area with excellent soil, that saw many cities and states form, their populations being fed largely by bananas.
Trade
While some level of trade had been ongoing, the rise of cities and empires made it far more central to the African economy. North Africa was central to the trade of the entire Mediterranean region. Outside of Egypt, this trade was mostly controlled by the Phoenicians who came to dominate North Africa, with CarthageCarthage
Carthage , implying it was a 'new Tyre') is a major urban centre that has existed for nearly 3,000 years on the Gulf of Tunis, developing from a Phoenician colony of the 1st millennium BC...
becoming their most important city. The Greeks
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
controlled much of the eastern trade, including along the Red Sea with Ethiopia. In this region a number of Greek trading cities that were established acted as a conduit for their civilization and learning.
The Egyptian (and later, Roman
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
) city of Alexandria
Alexandria
Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...
(founded by Alexander the Great in 334 BC
334 BC
Year 334 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Caudinus and Calvinus...
), was one of the hubs for Mediterranean trade for many centuries. Well into the 19th century Egypt remained one of the most developed parts of the world outside of Europe.
For most of the first millennium AD, the Axumite Kingdom in Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
and Eritrea
Eritrea
Eritrea , officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea derives it's name from the Greek word Erethria, meaning 'red land'. The capital is Asmara. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the southeast...
had a powerful navy and trading links reaching as far as the Byzantine Empire
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...
and India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
. Between the 14th and 17th centuries, the Ajuuraan State
Ajuuraan State
The Ajuuraan state or Ajuuraan sultanate was a Somali Muslim empire that ruled over large parts of East Africa in the Middle Ages. Through a strong centralized administration and an aggressive military stance towards invaders, the Ajuuraan Empire successfully resisted an Oromo invasion from the...
centered in modern-day Somalia
Somalia
Somalia , officially the Somali Republic and formerly known as the Somali Democratic Republic under Socialist rule, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. Since the outbreak of the Somali Civil War in 1991 there has been no central government control over most of the country's territory...
practiced hydraulic engineering
Hydraulic engineering
This article is about civil engineering. For the mechanical engineering discipline see Hydraulic machineryHydraulic engineering as a sub-discipline of civil engineering is concerned with the flow and conveyance of fluids, principally water and sewage. One feature of these systems is the extensive...
and developed new systems for agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
and taxation, which continued to be used in parts of the Horn of Africa
Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa is a peninsula in East Africa that juts hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea and lies along the southern side of the Gulf of Aden. It is the easternmost projection of the African continent...
as late as the 19th century.
In Southeast Africa, Swahili Kingdoms
Swahili culture
Swahili culture is the culture of the Swahili people living on the east coast of Tanzania, Kenya, and Mozambique as well as on the islands in the area, from Zanzibar to Comoros, who speak Swahili as their native language....
created a prosperous trade empire, where occupied the territory of modern-day Kenya
Kenya
Kenya , officially known as the Republic of Kenya, is a country in East Africa that lies on the equator, with the Indian Ocean to its south-east...
, Tanzania
Tanzania
The United Republic of Tanzania is a country in East Africa bordered by Kenya and Uganda to the north, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west, and Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique to the south. The country's eastern borders lie on the Indian Ocean.Tanzania is a state...
and Uganda
Uganda
Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...
. Swahili cities were important trading ports for trade with the Middle East and Far East.
In the interior of Africa, trade was far more limited. Low population densities made profitable commerce difficult. The massive barrier of the Congo
Congo Basin
The Congo Basin is the sedimentary basin that is the drainage of the Congo River of west equatorial Africa. The basin begins in the highlands of the East African Rift system with input from the Chambeshi River, the Uele and Ubangi Rivers in the upper reaches and the Lualaba River draining wetlands...
rainforests were more imposing than the Sahara, blocking trade through the center of the continent.
It was the arrival of the Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
ic armies that transformed the economies of much of Africa. Though Islam had comparatively little impact on North Africa where large cities, literacy, and centralized states had been the norm, Muslims were far more effective at penetrating the Sahara than Christians had been. This was largely due to the camel
Camel
A camel is an even-toed ungulate within the genus Camelus, bearing distinctive fatty deposits known as humps on its back. There are two species of camels: the dromedary or Arabian camel has a single hump, and the bactrian has two humps. Dromedaries are native to the dry desert areas of West Asia,...
, which had carried the Arab expansion and would soon after carried large amounts of trade across the desert.
Thus a series of states developed in the Sahel
Sahel
The Sahel is the ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition between the Sahara desert in the North and the Sudanian Savannas in the south.It stretches across the North African continent between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea....
on the southern edge of the Sahara which made immense profits from trading across the Sahara. The first of these was the Kingdom of Ghana, reaching it peak in the twelfth century. Soon, others such as the Mali Empire
Mali Empire
The Mali Empire or Mandingo Empire or Manden Kurufa was a West African empire of the Mandinka from c. 1230 to c. 1600. The empire was founded by Sundiata Keita and became renowned for the wealth of its rulers, especially Mansa Musa I...
and Kanem-Bornu
Kanem Empire
The Kanem Empire was located in the present countries of Chad, Nigeria and Libya. At its height it encompassed an area covering not only much of Chad, but also parts of southern Libya , eastern Niger and north-eastern Nigeria...
, also arose in the region. The main trade of these states was gold
Gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...
, which was plentiful in Guinea
Guinea (region)
Guinea is a traditional name for the region of Africa that lies along the Gulf of Guinea. It stretches north through the forested tropical regions and ends at the Sahel.-History:...
. Also important was the trans-Saharan slave trade that shipped large numbers of slaves to North Africa.
On the east coast of the continent, an equally important trade was developing as Swahili
Swahili people
The Swahili people are a Bantu ethnic group and culture found in East Africa, mainly in the coastal regions and the islands of Kenya, Tanzania and north Mozambique. According to JoshuaProject, the Swahili number in at around 1,328,000. The name Swahili is derived from the Arabic word Sawahil,...
traders linked the region into an Indian Ocean trading network, bringing imports of Chinese
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
pottery and India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n fabrics in exchange for gold, ivory
Ivory trade
The ivory trade is the commercial, often illegal trade in the ivory tusks of the hippopotamus, walrus, narwhal, mammoth, and most commonly, Asian and African elephants....
, and slaves.
European influence
The Atlantic Ocean had long been all but impenetrable to the galleys that plied the Mediterranean. That any ship needed to pass thousands of kilometers of waterless desert before reaching any populated regions also made trade impossible. These barriers were overcome by the development of the caravelCaravel
A caravel is a small, highly maneuverable sailing ship developed in the 15th century by the Portuguese to explore along the West African coast and into the Atlantic Ocean. The lateen sails gave her speed and the capacity for sailing to windward...
in Europe. Previously, trade with Sub-Saharan Africa could only be conducted through North African middlemen. Now Europeans could trade directly with the Africans themselves.
The first to arrive were the Portuguese
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
, who began significant trading with West Africa in the fifteenth century. This trade was primarily for the same commodities the Arabs had bought—gold, ivory, and slaves. The Portuguese sold the Africans Indian cloth and European manufactured goods but refused to sell them guns. Soon, however, other European powers such as France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
, the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
and Britain
Kingdom of Great Britain
The former Kingdom of Great Britain, sometimes described as the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain', That the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, shall upon the 1st May next ensuing the date hereof, and forever after, be United into One Kingdom by the Name of GREAT BRITAIN. was a sovereign...
were developing their own trade with Africa, and they had fewer restrictions.
This valuable trade lead to rapid change in West Africa. The region had long been agriculturally productive and, especially in western Nigeria, densely populated. The massive profits from trade and the arrival of guns lead to significant centralization and a number of states formed in the region such as the Ashanti Confederacy and Kingdom of Benin. These states became some of the wealthiest and most advanced in Africa. Wealthy merchants began to send their children to European universities and their well armed standing armies could challenge European forces.
Many West-African natives, such as Seedies and Kroomen
Seedies and Kroomen
Seedies and Kroomen were African sailors recruited locally into the British Royal Navy in the 19th and early 20th century....
, served on European ships, and received regular pay, which greatly enhanced their status back home.
Clearly, the slave trade enriched the segments of African society that traded in slaves. However, the modern historiography of slavery has swung between two poles on the question of its demographic and economic effects on Africa as a whole. Early historical accounts of the Atlantic slave trade were largely written for a popular audience by abolitionists and former slaves like Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano also known as Gustavus Vassa, was a prominent African involved in the British movement towards the abolition of the slave trade. His autobiography depicted the horrors of slavery and helped influence British lawmakers to abolish the slave trade through the Slave Trade Act of 1807...
who emphasized its profoundly negative effects on African peoples. As the 19th century progressed, accounts of the negative impact of slavery were increasingly used to argue for European colonization of the continent. Conversely, there were those, like the British explorer and geographer William Winwood Reade, who drew on the accounts of slave traders to argue that the effects of slavery were positive.
By the early 20th century, the view of slavery as a negative influence on Africa prevailed among professional academic historians in Europe and the United States. During the decolonization period following World War II, an influential group of scholars, led by J.D. Fage, argued that the negative effects of slavery had been exaggerated, and that the export of slaves had been offset by population growth. Walter Rodney
Walter Rodney
Walter Rodney was a prominent Guyanese historian and political activist, who was assassinated in Guyana in 1980.-Career:...
, a specialist on the Upper Guinea Coast, countered that European demand for slaves had vastly increased the economic importance of the slave trade in West Africa, with catastrophic effects. Rodney, who was active in Pan-African independence movements, accused Fage of whitewashing the role of Europeans in Africa; Fage responded by accusing Rodney of nationalist romanticism.
Debates on the economic impacts of the Atlantic trade were further stimulated by the publication of Philip Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), which argued that 9.566 million slaves were exported from Africa through the Atlantic trade. In the 1970s, the debate on the economic impacts of the Atlantic trade increasingly turned on demographic estimates of slave exports in relation to continental birth rates. Most scholars now believe that Curtin was too conservative in his calculation, with most estimates ranging between 11.5 million to 15.4 million. More recently, John K. Thornton has presented an argument closer to that of Fage, while Joseph Inikori, Patrick Manning and Nathan Nunn have argued that the slave trade had a long-term debilitating impact on African economic development. Manning, for example, arrived at the following conclusion, after accounting for regional variations in slave exports and assuming an annual African population growth rate of 0.5.%: the population of Africa would have been 100 million rather than 50 million in 1850, if not for the combined effects of the external and internal slave trades. Nunn, in a recent econometric analysis of slave-exporting regions in all parts of Africa, found "a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves taken from a country and its subsequent economic development." Nunn argues, moreover, that this cannot be explained by poverty prior to the slave trade, because more densely populated and economically developed parts of Africa regressed behind previously less developed, non-slave exporting areas during the course of the Atlantic, trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades.
Colonialism
Under colonial rule, the plantation system of farming was widely introduced in order to grow large quantities of cash crops, and employing cheap (often slave) African labor for export to European countries. Mining for gems and precious metals such as gold was developed in a similar way by wealthy European entrepreneurs such as Cecil Rhodes. The implementation and effects of these colonial policies were, arguably, genocidal in a number of cases. Belgian government commissions in the 1920s, for example, found that the population of Belgian CongoBelgian Congo
The Belgian Congo was the formal title of present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo between King Leopold II's formal relinquishment of his personal control over the state to Belgium on 15 November 1908, and Congolese independence on 30 June 1960.-Congo Free State, 1884–1908:Until the latter...
had fallen by as much as 50%, or from roughly 20 million to 10 million people, under Belgian rule as a result of forced labor (largely for the purposes of rubber cultivation), massacre by colonial troops, famine and disease. In white settler colonies like Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa and Southwest Africa (now Namibia), the most fertile lands were forcibly expropriated from the indigenous populations for use by white settlers. African farmers were pushed onto "native reserves," usually located on arid, marginal lands. In German Southwest Africa, somewhere between 25,000 and 100,000 Hereros were killed either resisting land expropriation by white settlers, or by starvation in the desert where they were exiled. The legacy of these land expropriations remains in Africa today, as over 80% of the arable land in both South Africa and Namibia remains white-owned.
Today, many African economies suffer from the legacy of colonialism. In addition to taking millions of Africans out of the continent, European countries neglected to build adequate infrastructure in Africa. In agriculture, the plantation systems that they introduced were highly unsustainable and caused severe environmental degradation. For example, cotton severely lowers soil fertility wherever it is grown, and areas of West Africa that are dominated by cotton plantations are now unable to switch to more profitable crops or even to produce food because or the depleted soil. Recently, more countries have initiated programs to revert to traditional, sustainable forms of agriculture such as shifting cultivation and bush fallow in order to grow enough food to support the population while maintaining soil fertility which allows agriculture to continue in future generations. (Gyasi)
See also
- Economy of AfricaEconomy of AfricaThe economy of Africa consists of the trade, industry, and resources of the people of Africa. , approximately 922 million people were living in 54 different countries. Africa is by far the world's poorest inhabited continent...
- History of AfricaHistory of AfricaThe history of Africa begins with the prehistory of Africa and the emergence of Homo sapiens in East Africa, continuing into the present as a patchwork of diverse and politically developing nation states. Agriculture began about 10,000 BCE and metallurgy in about 4000 BCE. The history of early...
- Colonization of Africa
- Economic history of EuropeEconomic history of Europe-Technology diffusion in conflict:Conflict between regions, in Viking raids and in Crusader invasions of the Middle East incidentally led to the diffusion of and refinement technology instrumental to overseas travel, from the 8th Century to the 12th Century. People made improvements in ships,...
- International Economic History AssociationInternational Economic History AssociationThe International Economic History Association serves as an umbrella organization, which has been established in 1960 and unites economic historians from all over the world. Beside national economic history associations, it welcomes as member organizations also societies, which specialize in a...
Citations
- Curtin, Philip. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
- Daniels, Rudolph. "The Nature of the Agrarian Land Question in the Republic of South Africa." The American Journal of Economics, July 2006, pp. 1–16
- Fage, J.D. A History of Africa (Routledge, 4th edition, 2001 ISBN 0-415-25247-4) (Hutchinson, 1978, ISBN 0-09-132851-9) (Knopf 1st American edition, 1978, ISBN 0-394-32277-0)
- Hochschild, Adam (1998). King Leopold's Ghost. Pan Macmillan. ISBN ISBN 0-330-49233-0.
- Inikori, Joseph E. (ed.) Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies (London and New York, 1982)
- -The Chaining of a Continent: Export Demand for Captives and the History of Africa South of the Sahara, 1450-1870 Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1992.
- Inikori, Joseph E. and Engerman, Stanley (Eds.) The Atlantic Slave Trade Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992
- Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983
- Manning, Patrick. Slavery and African Life: Occidential, Oriental and African Slave Trades. London: Cambridge University Press, 1990
- Nduru, Noyiga. "Walking the Tightrope of Land Reform." Inter Press Service News Agency, September 30, 2006
- Nunn, Nathan. "The Long Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades." The Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2008, pp. 139–176
- Reade, William Winwood. Savage Africa. New York: Harper Brothers Publishers, 1864
- Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. (Washington: Howard UP, 1982, ISBN 0-88258-096-5)
- Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998