This chapter reconsiders two turning-points in the economic and social transition from human to agricultural commodities as the principal exports of West Africa. Discussion of this process usually focuses on the first half of the nineteenth century, featuring British abolition and the growth of ‘legitimate commerce’ in the form of palm-oil and groundnut exports. It will be argued here that the chronological scope should be lengthened, at both ends of the story. For the beginning, I propose a shift in focus from 1807, the year the most powerful of the slave-trading countries embarked upon abolition, to 1787, when the volume of slave shipments actually began to decline. For the ending, I suggest that the modern social (as opposed to economic) history of African agriculture began not in the early nineteenth but in the early twentieth century.

These changes to the description raise questions about the causality. I will argue first that, putting the evidence on movements in the prices paid for slaves alongside the data on the numbers of slaves shipped, it becomes clear that the ‘premature’ fall in slave exports from West Africa must be endogenous, in the sense of stemming from the interaction of the Atlantic slave trade and African societies and economies, rather than from events elsewhere in the Atlantic. This has been largely over-looked in the literature, so it will be given relatively detailed attention here.