Slave-Raiders and Middlemen, Monopolists and Free-Traders: the supply of slaves for the Atlantic trade in Dahomeyc. 1715–1850

Abstract

This article, which extends and modifies the analysis offered in an earlier article in this journal (1977), examines what is known of the organization of the supply of slaves for the trans-Atlantic trade in Dahomey, with particular emphasis on the relative importance of local slave-raiding and the purchase of slaves from the interior, and on the evolution of a group of private merchants within Dahomey. It is argued that initially the kings of Dahomey sought to operate the slave trade as a royal monopoly, and relied exclusively upon slave-raiding rather than purchasing slaves from the interior. From the mid-eighteenth century, however, Dahomey did seek to operate as a ‘ middleman’ in the supply of slaves from the interior, and since its kings did not normally attempt to control this aspect of the trade this involved the emergence of a private sector in the slave trade. Although merchants in Dahomey were in origin state officials, licensed to trade on behalf of the king or ‘caboceers’ (chiefs), they subsequently acquired the right to trade on their own account also and thus became in some measure independent of the state structure. The autonomy and wealth of the merchant community in Dahomey were further enhanced by the transition from slave to palm oil exports in the nineteenth century, when leading merchants moved into large-scale oil production, using slave labour supplied by the king. There were recurrent tensions between the monarchy and the merchants over commercial policy and over the monarchy's expropriatory fiscal practices, and the conflict of interests between the two was exacerbated by the development of the oil trade, undermining the solidarity of Dahomey in the face of the European imperialism of the late nineteenth century.

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