Title: African Participation and Resistance to the Trade · African Passages, Lowcountry Adaptations · Lowcountry Digital History Initiative
Headings: African Participation and Resistance to the Trade
African Participation and Resistance to the Trade
Content: African Participation and Resistance to the Trade · African Passages, Lowcountry Adaptations · Lowcountry Digital History Initiative
African Participation and Resistance to the Trade
Map of West Africa, created by Johann Baptist Homann, 1743. Mossi horsemen, created by J.W. Buel, 1890. The Mossi Kingdoms resisted the trans-Saharan slave trade and slave raiding from the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai Empires in West Africa, but with the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, they became involved in slave trading in the 1800s. With some early exceptions, Europeans were not able to independently enter the West and Central African interior to capture Africans and force them onto ships to the Americas. Instead, European traders generally relied on a network of African rulers and traders to capture and bring enslaved Africans from various coastal and interior regions to slave castles on the West and Central African coast. Many of these traders acquired captives as a result of military and political conflict, but some also pursued slave trading for profit. Scholars provide various explanations for why African traders were willing to supply enslaved Africans to Europeans for the trans-Atlantic trade. By the early sixteenth century, slavery already played a major role in some western and central African societies, and contributed to maritime slave trade systems across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Subsequently, some historians argue that Europeans in the Atlantic took advantage of a pre-existing slave trade system in Africa to obtain labor for expanding plantation economies in the Americas. During the development of the trans-Atlantic trade, West and Central Africa consisted of diverse political and social structures, ranging from large empires to small states, and these groups often conflicted over internal politics as well as economic expansion.