FREETOWN’S GOVERNOR ZACHARY MACAULAY reported back to the Sierra Leone Company’s Court of Directors in London in 1797 that, at a palaver—a locally used term for an official dispute—near the company’s legitimate commerce trading post at Freeport, a Susu leader’s deputy inveighed against the slave traders: “It is you slave traders who cause all our palavers. It is you who set the people in this country one against another. And what do you bring us for this? We have Cloth of our own if you were gone tomorrow we should not be naked. If you were gone we should want but little guns and powder.”1 A crisis of overcommodification had led a variety of actors in the Atlantic World to reassess the place of things in their lives, and the morality and political values associated with them. Commodity currency became an important source of concern for African, British, and American abolitionists who saw the demand for things as a fundamentally corrosive element of African participation in Atlantic trade. The Susu deputy pointed out that through new, legitimate commerce “the Sierra Leone boats will bring us all we want. They do more for us already than you do. Your money goes up the Country for Slaves. We see none of it but the Rum that turns all our hearts. They [Sierra Leone] buy our Bulls our Goats, our Sheep, our Cloths. And whose child have they taken away? Whose wife have they troubled? What mischief have they done?”2 Sierra Leone’s legitimate commerce would bring them all they wanted in return for goats, sheep and cloth, instead of setting the people against each other and plying them with rum, guns, and powder.
Determining what was ethical within a newly emerging consumer and industrial capitalist economy was difficult enough within the nation-state—the primary unit of discussion for many of the most influential early political economists. Although Mandeville and Voltaire, Montesquieu and Smith, all wrote about international trade, they did so largely with the wealth and prosperity of the nation in mind. The idea of doux commerce promoted trade as a moderating force between nations—nations that traded were less likely to go to war against each other.3 Trade had made war between European and African traders unlikely on the Guinea Coast because it was being conducted to mutual advantage. But doux commerce alone was not able to promote any specific ethical values other than the mutual peaceful pursuit of economic gain. The application of specific cultural values within trade required intervention through the power of individuals, companies, or states. Ethical conduct in trade, then, was determined by mutual advantage, but also by cultural power.
Misunderstandings about the ethical regulation of the slave trade led abolitionists to make assumptions about how new forms of trade would benefit both African states and the captives those states were enslaving. If the demand for enslaved captives from Africa was creating chaos and war in order to generate those captives to be traded for commodities, a new form of commerce would need to be introduced to allow Africans to access the commodities they were accustomed to getting through the Atlantic trade. Paradoxically, however, there were ethical concerns about the types of “legitimate” commerce—especially the trade in guns—that stemmed from those same assumptions about the state of war caused by the slave trade and the supposed lack of consumer markets in Africa. In providing former slave-trading states with “all we want,” legitimate commerce could reinforce some forms of global consumerism and undermine others.
Believing that violence was endemic in Africa as a result of the slave trade, and that this had prevented the proper development of industrious agricultural production, the Sierra Leone Company had an ambivalent relationship with the guns and powder that were important items of trade. Arms dealing may not seem like the kind of business that a company founded to abolish the slave trade should be involved in, but over the course of the long nineteenth century, abolitionists would change their positions not only about what business approaches or economic ideologies would work best to advance their cause, but also what kinds of trade were ethical at all. For many participants in the movement, this meant boycotting certain products produced by slave labor. But for others it meant promoting one kind of unethical trade (the gun trade) in support of ending another (the slave trade).
The slave trade itself was not ethical, and its effects were contested by a variety of African, European, and American political and social movements. But for the traders themselves, by the late eighteenth century a system had come into practice to overcome agency problems and ensure that it was conducted to the satisfaction of both African and external traders.4 In part this was a result of the balance of power in the conduct of the trade. European traders relied on the support of local rulers. Historians of West Africa have referred to this as a cross-cultural “moral community.”5 On the Guinea Coast, Europeans married women from local ruling families so that they could access trade networks, but also to be protected under the laws of the polity. The arrival of Europeans also led to the adaptation of the existing landlord–stranger relationship—in which traders were adopted as “strangers” of local rulers (“landlords”), who received annual payments in return for representing the traders in the legal system. Trading societies like the Efik in Calabar also gained prominence as local regulators of trade. Or rulers kept Europeans at arm’s length by requiring that they remain in forts on the coast. And European companies were rarely given any kind of monopoly power, in order to generate competition among slave buyers and keep prices high.6 The evolution of new long-distance, long-term credit and mechanisms to ensure quality and price transparency also evolved from a combination of European and African approaches.
By controlling aspects of the trade, groups along the Guinea Coast could also control some of its ethics. The Oyo state in western Nigeria, for instance, created a system of insiders and outsiders that regulated who could be sold.7 The Aro, in Old Calabar, sold political dissidents into the Atlantic slave trade after they had been found guilty. Although European travel writers and slave traders believed that many of the criminal cases were staged purely for profit, this mechanism had an important state function in minimizing dissent and ensuring state authority.8 In Muslim areas, Islamic commercial law (Malīkī) was responsible for shaping the moral community. Long-distance diaspora networks managed the commerce between the Sahara, the Sahel, the forest zone, and the coast, just as they did from the coastal trading posts across the Atlantic and into Anglo-American and other commercial networks. But the attenuated nature of the trading chain meant that diaspora traders were particularly vulnerable to political changes of the type affecting West African states in the late eighteenth century. Muhammadu Bello, son of Uthman dan Fodio, and Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi from the neighboring Muslim state of Borno wrote extensively to articulate the specific definition of “good Islamic practice” in order to determine who could and could not be enslaved, for instance.9
But these laws could also impact the types of legitimate commerce that were possible. For instance, if a legitimate produce commodity could be considered food, then using it in credit-based exchange would be prohibited. This was because, as in Christian teaching, the practice of trading the same type of good in different quantities (one type of food for another, for instance) and with a delay in payment could be seen as riba (usury).10 This classification was important because consumable goods like food or money could not bear interest, which would be usurious and therefore unethical. Trade in legitimate produce, then, would need to account for these restrictions. Ghyslaine Lydon recounts, “Mahand Baba Wuld ‘Abayd (d. 1860), a jurist from Trarza,” the region just north of the Senegal River, which was deeply involved in the politics and commerce of that river, “wrote an influential fatwa on gum arabic debating its quality as a food or condiment. He established that it was considered food because it was used in medicine, drinks, and dishes and during times of food scarcity.”11
Because gum arabic was the legitimate product overtaking the slave trade even before the end of the eighteenth century in Senegambia, in part because of the revolutionary activities in Upper Senegal, this was an important fatwa with potentially harmful implications for the success of legitimate commerce. Luckily for observant traders, then, “his own student, al-Harith b. Mahand b. al-Shuqawi, took the opposite view, declaring that gum arabic, which was a major trade item in western Africa, could be exchanged with a payment delay, and therefore could be defined as nonfood, and thus Muslims could trade it for food without fear of committing usury.”12 This interpretation of how to classify commodities—as food or currency—allowed the gum trade to flourish at the end of the eighteenth century, an example of a successful and smooth transition to legitimate commerce in Senegal, growing from 12 percent of Senegambia’s exports in the 1780s to 71.8 percent in the 1830s, while slaves as a percentage of exports dropped from 86.5 to 1.9 percent in the same period.13 But it was an interpretive choice, not an inherent moral quality of the product, which determined whether the Trarza could continue trading the item. As the nineteenth century progressed, political leaders could still make choices about how they wanted to interpret the moral values associated with various trade goods.
Commodity currencies raised a variety of ethical questions about the ability to trade with a payment delay, and what the inherent moral value was of a good. In Europe, abolitionists became concerned that people in Africa were willing to sell other people for what amounted to, in their telling, “a few baubles”—otherwise known as the “geegaw myth.”14 During the slave trade, standard measures of the commodity currencies used in trade had come into effect by the mid-eighteenth century: the “bar,” the trade ounce, the ackie. These measures were different on different parts of the coast, but were roughly standard. For each, a quantity of consumer goods (especially cotton cloths and other fashionable items) was valued at a fixed rate. Enslaved people, then, were also valued at that rate. So, for instance, in Accra in the late eighteenth century, a trader of the Company of Merchants trading to Africa spent a total of 4 ounces, 7 ackies for one girl, in the form of “1 anker Liquor, 1 Chintz, 14 Bll powder, 8on knives, 2on peter, 2 cases, 2 Romals, 1 Gun, 1 Brawl, 1on Tankard; Dashed 1 cotton” and one boy for 4 ounces, one ackie, in the form of “1 roll tobacco; 2 guns; 1 Anker; 7on flints; Dashed 1 / 3 chintz” plus a “custom of 2 trade oz.”15 The trade ounce fluctuated in real terms, like any exchange rate, throughout the eighteenth century, but by the 1820s it had gone out of use in the Gold Coast.16 In Senegambia, imported goods from European ships were assessed in hides, while slaves were denominated in bars of iron, with one bar of iron being equal to eight hides.17 The exchange rates were somewhat negotiable but were understood to consist of certain qualities and types of commodities. Not only was this a regulated and fairly stable form of exchange, but it was also driven by expanding consumer demand, contrary to abolitionist arguments.
But abolitionists believed that the value of the commodities arriving in Africa was minimal, and to them the apparent reliance of African coastal economies on these commodities demonstrated their underdeveloped and subservient nature. James Searing notes, “From the African perspective Europeans paid high prices for slaves in scarce imported goods.”18 But the abolitionists’ misunderstanding of the commodity currencies was stoked by the supporting evidence provided by slave traders like Malachy Postlethwayt. An employee of the Royal Africa Company, Postlethwayt wrote prolifically on the state of African trade, agricultural potential, and consumer markets in the mid-eighteenth century. He hoped to undermine the free traders who had supplanted the monopoly of the Royal Africa Company in the mid-eighteenth century and to encourage state investment in African colonization plans. Deregulation, he argued, would “ever spirit up wars and hostilities among the negro-princes and chiefs for the sake of making captives of each other for sale,” obstructing “the civilizing of these people” and preventing the extension of “trade into the bowels of Africa.”19 These wars were caused by the temptations of the European slave traders’ wares, according to one of the abolitionists’ most important sources, the former slave, Olaudah Equiano.20 Both slave traders and formerly enslaved Africans agreed: demand for European goods caused wars to generate captives for sale.
This was important because one of the standard agreements in ethical principle between European and African political philosophies was that war captives could be sold into slavery.21 Other forms of slavery in Africa were stringently regulated, in theory if not always in practice. In Senegambia, war captives were frequently sold into the Atlantic trade, but second-generation slaves were supposed to be legally protected from sale.22 The African Muslim view at the end of the eighteenth century was that enslavement of Muslims was unethical and forbidden.23 Nasr al-Din, who conquered the Senegal valley for Islam in the 1670s, declared that “God never allowed Kings to pillage, kill, or make their people captives,” particularly for sale to Christian Europeans.24 When the Fulani jihad of Uthman dan Fodio took up the mantle of al-Din and ‘Abd al’Qadr Kane’s revolutions, he issued a number of injunctions against enslavement, several of which linked enslavement to the seizure of property.25 Specifically, the enslavement of freeborn Muslims, the enslavement of “heathens” with whom a peace treaty had been signed, the enslavement of captives from a war started by someone else, and the enslavement of oppressors were all “unlawful by assent.”26 A text laying out the moral principles of the caliphate, written by dan Fodio and later translated by his daughter, Nana Asma’u, stated that “the enslaver of a freeman who inflicts on him harsh treatment” would suffer a fate of enslavement by the Fires of Hell.27
The exception to these prohibitions was war against apostates. As justification of enslavement practices in the Sokoto jihad, an injunction ruled that “to make war upon the congregation of the apostates (juma’ at al-murtaddin) is obligatory by assent, and that their property is booty (fai’un), and that in the matter of their enslavement there are two opinions, the widespread one being its prohibition, and the other that the perpetrator of this act does not disobey (the law) if he is following an authority which asserts its lawfulness.”28 As the regulations of the caliphate suggested, though, this was not a free-for-all. Although enslavement was sanctioned, West African Muslims were very clear that only specific circumstances—warfare against apostates, or birth into slavery—allowed a person to be enslaved, and those conditions were regulated both by the legitimate government and by God.29
It was the realization—among African, European, and American abolitionists—that warfare was being caused by the search for slaves that began raising moral objections: as Thomas Clarkson later put it, “it was not the war which was the cause of the Slave Trade, but the Slave Trade which was the cause of the war.”30 Even in 1822, a visitor to the Gambia commented, “Yet there is no doubt, that where a king can dispose of his prisoners to slave-dealers, he will do so, even when the war may not have commenced for the purpose; for it is well known, that where there is a regular demand for slaves, as at Senegal, &c the chiefs go out for that purpose alone; and that not merely to fight with other chiefs, but even to surprise the towns in their own kingdoms. Well may the cultivation of the soil be so little attended to, as it appears to be where I have been.”31
If this was the case, then wars were being started to steal people for the slave trade. Julie Holcomb has argued that Quaker biblical arguments “against man stealing” paved the way for an understanding of slavery as theft in the British and American contexts.32 These Quaker protests initially took place in the 1680s and 1690s, roughly contemporary with Nasr al-Din’s reforms in Senegal, and at the same time John Locke provided further rationale to argue that if they were captured explicitly for sale, slaves were therefore illegally and unnaturally deprived of their right of “property in his own person.”33 Locke wrote that “a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another.”34
Examples of “person stealing” were observed by Europeans or reported to them in hopes of retribution. Throughout the age of abolition, visitors and residents on the West African coast reported to European and American readers about the prevalence of this practice. In 1822 a visiting commodore wrote, “The system of ‘Panyarring’ or stealing of people is very general in some parts. Whilst we were at Cape Coast a woman belonging to that Town was stolen by a man of a Village about five miles off, as she was returning from her Rice Plantation.”35 And on a visit to Sherbro Island, southeast of Freetown, in 1793, Zachary Macaulay said that “Addow” (one of the leaders) was eager to trade with the antislavery colony because “Altho occasionally engaged in the slave trade, he seems to rejoice in the prospect of its Abolition. Some years ago his town was destroyed by James Cleaveland and many of his people carried away into slavery. He still waits an opportunity of revenging this injury.”36
This was a powerful argument against the morality of the Atlantic slave trade, one regularly tied to the broader commercial case. Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, had described Africans as existing in “continual danger” that made them unable to think beyond their own immediate wants and needs.37 “Person stealing” prevented the development of any industry, investment, property laws, or consumer markets, because people could not make long-term plans. Zachary Macaulay, as chairman of the African Institution in London, wrote to Benjamin Rush, chairman of the Philadelphia-based Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the United States, recommending that the two organizations work together in Africa to overcome “that insecurity of person and property which presents an insuperable bar to the progress of Improvement.”38 Malthus much more explicitly explained that the arguments of the abolitionists must be right by his reasoning because “all the facts which I have mentioned, and which are taken principally from [Mungo] Park, if they do not absolutely prove that the wars in Africa are excited and aggravated by the traffic on the coast, tend powerfully to confirm the supposition. The state of Africa, as I have described it, is exactly such as we should expect in a country where the capture of men was considered as a more advantageous employment than agriculture or manufactures.”39
This reading hardened into truth for the political economists who framed the wider understanding of global trading interactions in the early nineteenth century. By the 1820s it was commonly argued that the slave trade had devastated the economies of Africa by inciting and exacerbating war, undermining Africans’ ability to efficiently participate in global exchange because they could not be effective consumers without being industrious producers. As Malthus, Smith, Ricardo, and others argued, there were doubts that other societies would be able to operate efficiently or industriously without European intervention. One writer stated, in an 1821 summary of the available literature on Africa, that the slave trade caused uncertainty and a state of “apprehension of captivity.” Describing Senegambia in the early nineteenth century, Frederic Shoberl commented, “We should at once conclude, that the very insecurity of person and property which such a state of society implied, would of itself extinguish all the motives to regular industry, and limit the culture of the soil very nearly to what was required for supplying the immediate wants of nature.”40 This echoed both Smith and Malthus, who saw the apparent lack of property as being at the heart of what they believed to be African underdevelopment.41 Abolitionists made an argument for economic intervention in the economies of this region by building an image of Africa as violent, war-torn, and chaotic as a result of the slave trade, a site of backward and illogical commerce that created uncertainty and undermined productivity and the ability of families to build wealth and accumulate things. The state of war created by the slave trade was the opposite of legitimate commerce, which, if introduced, would allow Africans to “become” civilized consumers.42
The traders engaging with Africa, however, knew that the demand for consumer goods was growing at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, and that Africans would not have to be taught how to be good consumers. It was the abolitionists’ natural allies in Africa, in fact, who were driving some of the conditions abolitionists believed were fundamental to African political economy. The disruptions caused by the revolutionary activities and Islamic state-building of places like Futa Toro and Sokoto, which included ideology opposed to the Atlantic slave trade, were causing migration, enslavement, and shifting commercial and political alliances, which contributed to much of the warfare abolitionists heard reported.
Concerns about the consumer’s responsibility for the sale of people into the Atlantic slave trade to produce (either literally, or in the form of payment) luxury goods led to nonconsumption movements in order to break the demand side of the equation. But savvy traders were aware that the demand side was not wholly to be found in Europe and America: demand for consumer goods was also part of the driving logic behind the sale of enslaved people in Africa. A former slave trader wrote of his time in West Africa that he had encountered “the inexhaustible store of valuable articles, which they could substitute for the unnatural traffic in human flesh; and showed incontestably that they could improve their produce to a state worthy the return of British luxuries.” The improvement of their agricultural produce for export would be necessary because “the glare and relish of these luxuries … now grown essential to them by use, they cannot easily forego; but if the inhuman process were abolished, they would be under the necessity, and would be desirous of meeting your exports with some more valuable and more guiltless branch of trade.”43
When the slave trade was legally abolished, the variety of laws passed by Atlantic states attempted to codify into law what was unethical about the trade. These laws made reference to international trade (internal slave trading in all markets was unaffected), but had very limited enforcement mechanisms, as is highlighted by the continuation of illegal Atlantic slave trading through the century. What was needed to enforce the legal abolition of the Atlantic slave trade was still international cooperation among traders and on-the-ground negotiation. Opinions generally were divided on the best way forward. In Britain, some abolitionists thought their focus should be on convening treaties with European powers and capturing and prosecuting European traders. In Sierra Leone, “eventually Macaulay was to be convinced by an ‘intelligent native’ that African law ensured that an escaped slave became the property of the headman with whom he had sought refuge: one property law was superimposed upon another.”44 Others thought the best way forward was to convince—through commerce or through force—African merchants and rulers to abandon the slave trade. Instead of forcing anti-slave-trading states like Futa Toro to cut themselves off from trade, legitimate commerce would give these states access to consumer goods without their having to trade in slaves. This commercial argument was essentially the exact opposite of a boycott—what would later be called a “buycott.”45
As Law, Schwarz, and Strickrodt have written, “it was recognized that African rulers and merchants could not be expected to give up the slave trade unless they were offered alternative means of obtaining the imported European and American goods which they had become accustomed to consume.”46 Abolitionists believed that African merchants and consumers would react rationally to the end of the slave trade if they were provided with an alternative. In the Gold Coast, where the Fante had been important trading partners of the British for much of the eighteenth century, as well as serving as wage laborers, paid in goods, at Cape Coast Castle, abolition was condemned “as it deprives them of the means of acquiring those articles of Luxury, with that facility they were accustomed to.”47 This was deeply worrying to abolitionists who were concerned that the legal suppression of the slave trade would not be enough to cut off the supply of slaves to the Americas.
This fear accorded well with Zachary Macaulay’s own experience in the wider Sierra Leone region when he was acting as governor for the Sierra Leone Company. Sierra Leone (actually Freetown colony) was a mainland settlement chosen by philanthropists and colonizers based in London for its good harbor and supposedly fertile land. The colony was settled by people of African descent resident in London, as well as a handful of white settlers, in 1787, before being reestablished in 1791 with the settlement of more than 1,000 Black Loyalists who had fought alongside the British in the American Revolution.48 The settlement was at first self-governing, and then, beginning in 1791, run by the Sierra Leone Company, and it maintained a commitment to fight the slave trade throughout its early history. Since it was not an island settlement, positive interactions with local, established African towns were deeply important to the survival of the colony: the settlers and their government, with no family-based claims to territory or trading rights, relied on the protection of a local “landlord” in any political or commercial disputes, and unresolved palavers could, and did, spill into violence on several occasions.49 The city’s dependence on the goodwill of the Temne, from whom they leased their land, was mirrored in their Atlantic-facing commerce: although the Sierra Leone Company was British, they reached out to American traders for goods as a result of reduced European shipping in the British-French wars. American ships could provide trade goods essential to the colony’s interaction with the Temne, Susu, Bago, and more distant Fula in Futa Jallon, whose visits to the coast became an obsession for early Freetown governors. But there was also high demand for American goods among Freetown’s residents, who had once lived in the American colonies.
The colony at Freetown operated as a sort of sporadic market town for legitimate produce, but it also disrupted local trading practices, distorted prices, and created new winners in the local economy. While governor, Macaulay supported the legitimate-commerce depot at Freeport, on the Rio Pongas to the north of the colony, in addition to the colony’s trade with other emerging commercial centers, like Kankan in Guinea. Capitalized to the tune of £150,000, the Company expected a significant trade, as well as rental income from lands leased out to settlers for agricultural purposes. They sent out a statement of their intentions, which began, “The Sierra Leone Company established by the British Parliament do hereby declare, that they will send out goods from England and take all kinds of African produce in exchange; that they will not deal in slaves themselves, nor allow of any slave trade on their ground.”50 It was clear that they both believed there was a significant demand for goods in Freetown and the surrounding area, and they did not really know what kinds of “African produce” to anticipate in exchange. As Suzanne Schwarz has described, “The first cargo of produce carried to Britain on the Amy in June 1793 was greeted with enthusiasm, as it was ‘neither degraded with injustice nor stained with blood.’ ”51 By 1812, four years after Freetown had become a Crown Colony, Sierra Leone returned over £11,000 worth of African produce to Britain, consisting of various kinds of wood, beeswax, tortoiseshell, hides, rosin, rice, guinea pepper, palm oil, gum, ostrich feathers, elephant teeth, copper, and coffee, ranging in value from nearly £4,000 for some goods, to a mere 12 shillings for the ostrich feathers.52
Consumer demand and the extremely valuable Atlantic consumer market was not something merchants wanted to give up. The scale of greater Sierra Leone’s consumer value was demonstrated by ships’ invoices in the trade. Brown & Ives’s captain, Martin Benson, was sure that a cargo of India goods and nankeens “suitable for the African Market” valued at “a thousand or twelve hundred pounds” would make “a very handsome profit.”53 When the American brig Ann was captured by the French in Senegal in 1809, it was carrying what the French government determined to be 169,777 francs worth of consumer goods and provisions, including 81,085 francs of clothing, 11,409 francs of tobacco, 13,200 francs worth of rum, and 7,972.50 francs worth of sugar.54 When the Olive Branch sailed from Rhode Island for Gorée and Sierra Leone in 1800, 60 percent of the ship’s cargo by value was cotton goods. On these cotton goods alone, the voyage of the Olive Branch made a $554 profit (equivalent to about $10,000 in modern purchasing power), and that’s assuming that the invoice cost had not been marked up, which was unlikely as it looks like the India goods were about $9,000 to import, which would mean a $3,500 profit before costs. They also sold 58 ladies’ parasols on the Windward Coast (primarily in Gorée and Sierra Leone).55 Settler Mary Perth owned her own shop in the colony, which was robbed in 1797 “of goods to the amount of about sixteen pounds,” but this amount of merchandise underestimates the scale of the retail trade, as “the thieves narrowly missed a Drawer containing some hundred dollars.”56 Settlers also bought retail from the Brown & Ives brig Maria: 1 box of 240 china bowls (for $60), 1 box of china cups and saucers (for $64), 6 half-barrels of butter biscuits (for $36), 96 nankeens (for $144), and 22 short checks (for $44).57 Such was the purchasing power of the urban, service-providing class of Freetown, particularly when the settlers banked their money together to make bulk purchases.58
As abolitionists tried to turn away from commodity currencies and their negative connotations, the Sierra Leone Company store in Freetown and its factory in Freeport both attempted to move toward issuing their own hard currency. This was one means of controlling the trade to ensure a closed system, which would prevent the slave trade from sneaking into the exchange. Anna Maria Falconbridge commented on the colony’s currency “that the neighbouring Factories and casual Traders receive it for what our Settlers purchase for them.”59 Wage labor would allow African consumers to access these global goods with cash, instead of by bringing slaves to market, and it would contribute to the wider project of demonstrating that industrious labor was stimulated by consumption. Macaulay ensured that the trade “is entirely transacted by the intervention in every case of a Money Medium. If a Stranger brings Ivory or Gold, he sells it at the current price and receives his money, which he again lays out to his taste. In the same way do all the Natives whether Timmanies, Bullams or Mandigoes manage their trade, and no objection is now heard made against the innovation. The articles brought by those last consist chiefly of Rice, Camwood, Live stock, yams, mats, Gum Copal, and fruit as oranges and pine apples.” The same system applied to the freed slave settlers, “many of whom have now boats carrying from two to Eight tons collect Rice, Camwood, and Live Stock, which they likewise dispose of for money with which to purchase a fresh assortment of Goods at the Store for trade.” And the Company store ensured that it had even more customers by tying Company wages (in cash) to purchases of goods from the Company store.60 Even visiting ships that wanted contracted services in the port had to pay in Sierra Leone currency and buy provisions through the Company store.61
So who were the Sierra Leone Company store’s local customers? In 1801, Binah Jordan, a settler, was paid $9 in Sierra Leone currency (45 shillings) for baking 305 weight of flour into ship’s bread for the Olive Branch, a net profit to her of 11 shillings, or $2.20 in Sierra Leone Company dollars.62 She likely did this to supplement the family’s income, but even if she did not, and even if she baked bread only for the vessels in and out of Freetown harbor that year (and not commercially for the other settlers), she could make $220 in a year, enough to cover subsistence at $115 per year, quit-rent on property (the settlers were all given plots), and have leftover monthly income that could be invested in property or capital goods. Given that several settler women traders had already purchased property investments of roughly £150 by the early nineteenth century—turning them into boardinghouses for colonial officials and visiting ship’s captains—the scale of this profit was not unusual.63 Profits could also be spent on consumption. In 1802 the Sierra Leone Company Store sold 1½ yards of flannel for $1.05; 1 yard of printed calico for 86 cents; 2 yards of white calico for $1.00; a pair of shoes for $2.10; and 2 pounds of sewing twine for $1.20.2 This gives a sense of the purchasing power of the urban, service-providing class of Freetown. At these prices it is conceivable—though unlikely—that a person in Binah Jordan’s circumstances would have new dresses every season.64 With other family members to sew for, and other household goods to be purchased, Binah probably did not stretch to this every month, but it is also important to bear in mind that her contribution was likely to be part of a larger family income.65 For ethical consumers around the Atlantic, fashion would not have to be sacrificed to morality.
As this example from the service sector shows, the legitimate commerce taking place in the colony involved more than just exporting agricultural produce. It also required the establishment of regular commerce, security, and trust to promote the industrious consumption of imports. Macaulay reported, “In our immediate neighbourhood cultivation had languished much for two years past, in consequence of the great Demand for Labour in the Colony, which the Natives found more profitable than labouring for their Chiefs.”66 The economic opportunities created by the town were not always those Macaulay, Clarkson, and the other members of the Clapham Sect of abolitionist evangelicals would have chosen. In the early days of the Freetown colony, traveler Anna Maria Falconbridge reported, “The men are employed in the Company’s service, and receive two shillings per day wages, out of which they pay four shillings per week for their provisions.”67 From occasional earnings as a pilot or hired hand for transatlantic ships, a man who sporadically hired himself out to local and Atlantic traders might earn something like £5 per year.68 In Freetown, that would be enough to buy 705 weight of Souchong tea from the Sierra Leone Company Store; or twelve ivory tea chests (with 10 shillings to spare); or 27.5 yards of flannel, any of which could get an aspiring trader started.69 The colony’s ability to enrage its trading partners by harboring runaway slaves demonstrates that the commercial appeal of Freetown was often beyond the control of its authorities. Tying labor to the Company store was one way to try to control labor and turn migration into a net positive for the colony’s development.
Despite the attempts to shift away from commodity currencies, Macaulay still believed that the Company store needed to stock guns and alcohol alongside the other trading goods, like cloth, that made up the “bar”—that assortment of goods that made up the coastal currency. Abolitionists who championed the sale of arms believed that groups became involved in slave trading in order to acquire guns, which were necessary for defending themselves from other slavers.70 Abolitionists like Macaulay argued that participating in the sale of guns and alcohol was an important way to help non-slave-trading groups in West Africa overcome what was known as the “gun-slave cycle.”
The “gun-slave cycle” theory asserts that Africans involved in the slave trade acquired guns (usually purchased with slaves) in order to enslave more captives. But there was a defensive aspect to the cycle as well, as people were driven to occasional slave trading in order to purchase the guns necessary to protect themselves from slave-raiding attacks. For the communities living in the Guinea-Bissau region—the Balanta, Beafada, Papel, Bijago, Brame, Diola—sporadic slave trading in order to purchase iron, cloth, and guns confirmed abolitionist fears that people were drawn into the slave trade in these ways.71 Oral tradition in the Gambia, as passed down by griots, holds that “in Niumi during the slave trade, those who had slaves sold them when they ran short of food. Also in times of war, when they ran short of gunpowder, they sold slaves and exchanged them for powder.”72 Sometimes those arms were even subsequently used to attack European slave traders.73
Equally, the frontier settlements on the Koinadugu Plateau, south of Futa Jallon, show that some groups encountered or engaged with European trade only through the gun trade. Archaeologist Christopher DeCorse notes that in the fortified settlements of the Koinadugu Plateau—Limba, Yalunka, and Kuranko—all of which were occupied throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “only limited amounts of European trade materials were noted” with the “major exception” of gunflints, which were prolific, and which accorded with other records suggesting that only the trade in guns and gunpowder was conducted with the coast.74 Kankan (Guinea), which had emerged by the late 1820s as an important commercial center, had strong links to Freetown legitimate commerce, including in the trade of gunpowder and guns, which were sold regionally by the, at that point, nonviolent, religious-commercial state.75 The Sierra Leone Company and other legitimate traders argued that they should trade guns for nonslave goods because this would allow people to avoid the slave trade while still defending themselves against slavers. As Rudolph Ware writes, “When we consider that an estimated 350,000–400,000 guns per year were entering West Africa in the second half of the eighteenth century, it becomes obvious that the fundamental dynamic that shaped ethical action in Atlantic Africa was the fact that even if you were not willing to trade in slaves, someone else was—and soon he would be coming to make you a slave.”76
Since the seventeenth century at least, guns had made up an important part of the trade assortment for slave merchants. Demand for guns manufactured in Britain grew beginning in the late seventeenth century. The manufacture of guns in Birmingham for the Africa trade has been seen as a classic example of African demand shaping manufacturing processes in industrializing Britain.77 These muskets were known, according to length and model, as “Long and Short Danes, Dutch, Carolinas, and Spanish,” which indicated both that the African gun consumers had preferences for certain “brands” of gun, and that the British desire to satisfy African demand led to manufacturing innovation as the Birmingham gunsmiths worked out a piece system for assembling the different models required for different markets.78 Specific types of guns were in demand in various coastal trading ports, so a European merchant had to know which ports he hoped to visit, and what was preferred there.79 In the 1790s, for instance, Dane guns were preferred in Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast while Bonny guns and Angola guns were popular elsewhere on the coast.80
There was high demand for guns, gunpowder, and gunflints in the late eighteenth century, which coincided with the height of the slave trade and the expansion of slaving into new regions.81 British customs records reveal some seventy categories of goods exported from Britain to Africa in 1787, including 1,258,400 pounds of gunpowder, valued at £37,923.82 Joseph Inikori has estimated that “between 1796 and 1805 a total of 1,615,309 guns were imported into West Africa from England, giving an annual average of 161,531.”83 In 1815, seven years after the abolition of the slave trade took effect, and at the early nineteenth-century peak of abolition enforcement, 4,184 guns were taken to parts of Africa (excluding the Cape and Morocco) by British ships.84 Even in 1822, long after Gorée had returned to the French, French officials on the island complained that the English sold guns and gunpowder (and the Americans sold rum), undercutting French sales.85
In the 1812 customs records of Britain, shipments to Senegal and Sierra Leone are disaggregated from the rest of Africa, with 590 guns valued at £442 being sent to Senegal.86 No guns were sent to Sierra Leone by British vessels that year. In fact, during the years of its operation (1791–1808) the Sierra Leone Company very often failed to send the correct trade assortment, in various years leaving out guns or alcohol for moral reasons. Other years saw the Company sending farming equipment in order to discourage trade in favor of settler agriculture, which the company’s directors had decided would better demonstrate the civilizational mission of the colony and convince African leaders to abandon the slave trade.87 In 1799 the Company commissioned a delivery from Brown & Ives in Rhode Island, which included rum and tobacco, but no guns. It was on his own initiative and knowledge of the Sierra Leone market that the captain, Martin Benson, brought out four carriage guns and a barrel of gunpowder.88 Benson also bought “5 Tower proof muskets and bayonets, 1 arm chest” from John Tilley, an agent at the slaving fort at Bunce Island, for $44.89 Even those not directly involved in the slave trade (as Benson apparently was not) still often found themselves forced to trade with slave traders in order to make up the assortment of goods needed for other parts of the coast, or to sufficiently provision themselves in the case of the colony.
Guns were more important as customs payments to governments where European slave traders operated than they were as trade goods used to purchase slaves.90 Historians have concluded that the trade in firearms was probably not exclusively tied to the slave trade, though the two did overlap. For instance, in twelve months of trading at Cape Coast in 1779, James Mourgue never recorded paying for a slave with a gun.91 In fact, in the second half of the eighteenth century, “arms” made up less than 10 percent of slave ships’ trading cargos in the major slaving regions of the Gold Coast, Bonny, Old Calabar, the Cameroons, and the Angola ports.92 However, farther up the coast, arms were a larger part of the cargo makeup in this period, ranging from 11 to 28 percent of cargos destined for Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast generally. In Futa Toro in 1807, the Almaami of Futa received as customs payment 3 trade guns, 500 lead balls, 500 gunflints, another 7 trade guns, and 60 pounds of powder, alongside a safe and lock, 28 pieces of guinea cloth, one measure of scarlet cloth, 50 piasters, yellow cambrics, and coral. Additionally, he received annually, as presents, 2 trade guns, 2 more guns, 14 pounds of gunpowder, 500 gunflints, 500 lead balls, alongside 6 guinea cloths, 8 pieces of paper, some scarlet cloth, a mirror, a padlock, and a pair of scissors, among other odds and ends.93
Because wars conducted explicitly to capture slaves for sale to European traders were at the heart of abolitionist arguments about the immorality of the Atlantic slave trade, the arms trade would seem to be a trade in obviously immoral goods that could also be boycotted by ethical traders both living in and trading with Africa. But guns were not necessarily being used in the ways abolitionists believed them to be, nor was the massive importation of weapons, powder, and bullets reflective of an increase in warfare. Guns were used for hunting, to protect crops, to protect trade caravans from attack, and for “victory celebrations, funerals, royal ‘customs,’ religious ceremonies” and other forms of prestige use.94 These multiple uses—alongside their obvious roles as defensive and offensive weapons—made them less problematic as moral goods for the African purchasers of guns than for the abolitionists contemplating the ethics of legitimate-commerce assortments and the implications of commodity currencies. The disconnect between the two views of the gun trade highlights the shifting moral standards that disrupted previous trading ethics in Atlantic West Africa.
Despite the sophistication of the African consumer market, and traders’ knowledge of the specificity and quality of goods in demand, abolitionists began to argue in the late eighteenth century that the quality of the guns provided in the slave trade, and the fact of wars conducted as slaving raids, demonstrated the unethical nature of the gun trade. An account of the slave trade by an American consul in North Africa reported that “multitudes of slaves were brought from the interior, and exchanged for brandy, iron, worthless firearms, and other trifles.”95 This was another rehearsal of the familiar argument that Africa’s consumers were naive and regularly duped into selling “their countrymen” for worthless goods.96 Despite the persistent “geegaw myth” that argued the guns being sent to West Africa in exchange for enslaved people were essentially worthless, a review of the actual guns sent in the late eighteenth century reveals that “on the whole, Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Windward Coast, the Bight of Benin, Old Calabar, and Cameroon tended to import rather more of the fairly high quality types of firearms.”97 It is likely that, although there was certainly a specific gun made in Birmingham for the African market, it was not of a lower quality in the period before 1840.98 After that period, however, the decline in quality was steep, as is demonstrated by the boycott of trade from the port at Lagos in 1855, when Igbo palm oil merchants refused to sell their palm oil in protest against the “substandard” guns they had received.99 African traders did not find guns problematic as trade goods, unless they did not meet quality standards.
To nineteenth-century abolitionists, what was more important than the truth of the gun-slave cycle, or the relationship between alcohol or luxury “baubles” and enslavement, was the convincing picture of global trade repercussions it painted: unscrupulous European slave traders arming despotic warlords who raided peaceful and defenseless villages for slaves to send to the Americas to make sugar and cotton for ignorant consumers back in Europe.100 Julie Holcomb, Lawrence Glickman, and other historians have pointed out that the free-produce movement caused an important shift toward seeing consumers as ultimately responsible for production.101 In both legitimate-commerce and free-produce thinking, consumer power turned slave traders and slave owners into amoral actors, who had no choice but to respond to the demands of the consumer. These purely self-interested economic actors could not be moral actors in their own right, nor could they see the broader impact of their economic behavior. This helps to explain why intervention was required: if consumers were responsible for the negative externalities of commerce, then they could be responsible for positive developments too. By claiming responsibility, though, both legitimate commerce and free produce minimized the role of state power, something consumer movements had been doing since the second half of the eighteenth century. Tariffs, subsidies, monopolies, military expansion, and legal regulation were fundamental to the shaping of the moral economy in ways the average consumer had come to believe was not the case.
This went along with the legitimate-commerce argument that the slave trade had had a deleterious effect on industry in Africa because it sowed instability, fear, and dependency, preventing long-term economic development (an argument echoed in debates over the effect of slavery on the American South’s lack of industrious development). Alcohol and guns were particularly easy to single out because of their associations with unproductive, or even anti-productive consumption.102 Perhaps this rationale was the reason for Freetown’s lack of guns to trade, which Macaulay complained of in 1793, given that abolitionist policies, rather than practical trading considerations, seemed to dictate what the Sierra Leone Company directors chose to send to the colony.
Despite Macaulay’s willingness to compete with the slave traders, he wanted to attract the widest possible participation in legitimate commerce and therefore was less keen to purchase the favor of local rulers with gifts of weapons. In 1797 he wrote to the Company’s directors, “I had a Letter from a Mandingo Chief today of rather a singular nature. It contained a complaint of an outrage committed on him by some people of a neighbouring nation, expressed his resolution of seeking revenge, and requested that for that purpose, I would furnish him with Guns, powder and ball. The Messenger seemed surprised at my positive refusal of the Demand of arms & ammunition.”103 Perhaps the fact that he was not familiar with this particular leader made Macaulay reluctant to give him the weapons. However, in the abolitionist rationale for trading in guns—to encourage their trading partners to abandon the slave trade because the same trade goods would be available in exchange for other commodities—trading firearms was different from gifting firearms to powerful leaders, who could potentially use the weapons to enslave others. A gun as a trade good—something purchased from the colony that could have been purchased from a slave trader—was legitimate commerce; a weapon as a gift was a sign of corruption and bribery.
Beginning in the 1850s, concern over firearms began to increase, possibly as a reflection of the growing success of legitimate commerce in moving African consumers away from the slave trade, and of the advancing technology brought about by the Industrial Revolution. In 1853,the popular periodical Hogg’s Instructor, published in Edinburgh, addressed the problem by proposing that “if traders from Europe would come up the Zambesi [in East Africa], the slave-dealer would soon be driven out of the market” by his ability to provide guns in exchange for goods like cattle and ivory instead of the “boys about fourteen years of age” demanded by the slave traders.104 The author acknowledged the unsavory connection between slave trading and the firearms trade: “But can the trade in firearms be prevented? So long as, according to Cumming’s statement, 3000 per cent can be made by it, it is in vain to stop it … We do not plead for the trade. We only say, stop that and stop the slave-trade by coercion, if you can.”105 While some proponents of abolition, like Macaulay, wanted to sell guns to help ease the transition from the slave trade for those African groups that required guns to defend themselves, others just tolerated the gun trade as unavoidable.
But in West Africa, French and habitant legitimate-commerce merchants operating on the Senegal River were growing concerned in the early 1850s that a new jihad in Eastern Senegal, led by Al Hajj Umar Tal, was going to disrupt trade in the region. The new governor of Saint-Louis, Louis Faidherbe, ceased weapons trading with Sheikh Umar Tal in 1854 in an attempt to both end the jihad and ultimately claim the territory Umar had taken. The ban on weapons sales to the movement led Umar Tal to source them from the British, to the south, and drove his conquest of towns that allowed him to intercept trade headed for the British in the Gambia River.106 Similarly, in the Rio Nunez and Rio Pongo, competition between the French and British legitimate traders interested in the region’s expanding groundnut trade saw them providing military support and conducting arms sales to the competing Landuman and Nalu in order to secure territorial dominance.107 Legitimate commerce was facilitated by gun sales, but it was also creating new power dynamics as revolutionary and colonial states used access to superior weaponry to control the new legitimate trade.
In 1865 a Parliamentary Select Committee on West Africa questioned the former British consul to West Africa, Richard Burton, on the state of the slave trade in West Africa. Burton’s views on Africa proved to be extremely influential in Britain over the course of the 1860s and 1870s. Burton was deeply uncomfortable with the state of trade along the coast of Nigeria and Benin, commenting that “there is very little difference” between the “condition of the country which is not exposed to the effect of the foreign and American slave trade and that which is.” This was because the legitimate trade Britons were pursuing in order to “diminish the slave trade” in Burton’s opinion “tends to diminish it with its own evils.”108
Burton’s testimony highlighted the ethical dilemmas facing antislavery activists in West Africa. Missionaries wanted to arm Abeokutans, who had forsaken the slave trade, to defend themselves against the slave-trading kingdom of Dahomey. While the subsequent wars did curtail Dahomey’s power in the region—in large part because the British intervened on behalf of the Abeokutans and annexed Lagos—it also disrupted local power relations, which Burton and others increasingly found disconcerting.109 Those involved in the “civilizing mission” that had followed from attempts to intervene in the slave trade placed an emphasis on “order”—especially as more ports came under direct colonial rule in the 1860s and 1870s. Alcohol and firearms, associated with the dying slave trade but also with unsavory dependency and corrupt consumerism, were believed to be undermining missionaries’ and reformers’ attempts to “improve” African societies. With the decline of the transatlantic slave trade in the 1860s, it was no longer considered moral to sell to African consumers whatever they wanted to buy. Just weaning them off the slave trade was no longer required, and morally conscientious capitalists should refrain from operating purely in search of profit. Responsible businessmen and women would need to consider the moral impact of the consumption or overconsumption or misuse of the products they were selling, such as alcohol.110 Of course, in the second half of the nineteenth century the moral stigma of alcohol also permeated domestic reform movements in Britain and the United States, where it was similarly argued that the “lower classes” should not be able to drink away their wages.
But in Africa, where the gun trade had once been promoted as crucial to the “correct” assortment to undermine slave traders, and where abolitionists had championed providing guns to the defenseless to fight back in wars started for the slave trade, the shift in ethical standards by campaigners would have an important disruptive impact. In Senegal, where Sheikh Umar’s wars against the Wolof aristocracy, for instance, continued the reforms started by Abd al-Qadr Kane in the late eighteenth century, he used French weapons against the enemies of his jihad. But in part as a result of the French ban on further sales and their attempts to stop his ascendancy to commercial hegemony of Eastern Senegal, Sheikh Umar ultimately ended up using his French (and increasingly British) weapons to fight the French, who had allied themselves with the Wolof state of Kajoor. Selling arms to anti-slave-trade jihadists was a successful policy as far as Africans fighting against the slave trade were concerned. But the policy did not necessarily make African commerce safer or African states more stable or wealthy or “industrious.”111
Turning to law, as they had with the slave trade itself, European campaigners sought to make the newly unethical illegal. In Article I of the 1890 Brussels Conference Act, the European colonial powers restricted the importation of “sophisticated” firearms and ammunition in all areas of Africa affected by the slave trade. The liquor trade was banned as well, and in areas where it was permitted, it was subject to new minimum tariff rates.112 More than one hundred years after the beginning of the campaign to end the slave trade from Africa, the slave trade, the alcohol trade, and the gun trade were understood to be joint scourges on the morals of Africa, preventing its “civilization.” The connection of the three in the minds of the late Victorians suggests the heightened awareness of global supply chains that years of boycotts and free-produce movements had created. But the act’s inclusion of the word “perfectionnée”—improved or “sophisticated”—suggests that more opportunistic agents of imperial expansion put to work in a different way what was now the accepted immorality of the three banned commodities. A lack of “improved” firearms would leave African peoples without a means of defending themselves from colonizers.
COMMODIFICATION WAS AT THE HEART of the debates over African trade and the possibilities of ethical commerce to use consumers’ own interest to improve the morality of the supply chain. One of the reasons people had found the Atlantic slave trade so horrifying was its abject commodification of human life in exchange for luxuries—meaningless baubles. Commodity currencies, which had been an important component of cross-cultural African trade, became an easy target for campaigners who sought to paint the slave trade as a chaotic state of war with no rules, a vision of the trade that a number of pro-regulation slave traders, like Malachy Postlethwaite, themselves had promoted in public discourse in the mid-eighteenth century.113
But consumer demand was important in West African commerce, and fashion could not be ignored. The right cloths, the right guns, the right alcohol had to be assorted for trade, or trade would not take place, as Freetown was all too aware. Attempting to shift to currency-based rather than commodity-based trade was an important intervention of the Sierra Leone Company, but it still relied on having the goods on hand in their Company store to help promote the idea that African consumers would not be worse off without the slave trade.
The standards that governed ethical commerce were reflective of both the moralities of the societies involved in the trade and the changing awareness of the global interconnections that governed modern consumer commerce. Assigning moral and political value to the commodities of the Atlantic World was an attempt to define the limits of what could be sold, and also to get people to think about the relationship between supply and demand, and the global connections between production and consumption. As the debate over weapons shows, this was not always an entirely straightforward connection, or an easy moral calculation.