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Sortings and ‘Ounce Trade’ in the West African Slave Trade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Karl Polanyi
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Extract

The records of trading between Africans and Europeans on the Guinea Coast since antiquity raise issues the practical resolution of which has never ceased to occupy economic historians. The Herodotean inadequacies of dumb barter in Carthaginian goods and in gold dust were fully resolved only at the time of the eighteenth-century slave trade. In Senegambia and even on the Windward Coast, as we now know, the Royal African Company had still to go without an effective profit-and-loss accountancy. With the advent of the regular slave trade two new commercial devices had to be introduced by the Europeans. Both the ‘sorting’ and the ‘ounce trade’ sprang from the vital need for adjustment between the radically different trading methods of Europeans and Africans. And it was not so much a case of mutual adjustment, for of the two systems only one, the European, adjusted.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , November 1964 , pp. 381 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1964

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