5.3: The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Africa (1800-1850)

Atlantic Revolutions and the Industrial Revolution 

In the early 1800s, two contradictory trends affected Africans in Africa and the African diaspora in the Americas. On one hand, the Atlantic Revolutions ushered in new ideas such as freedom and liberty which contradicted the institution of slavery. Not only were many white elites bothered by this contradiction, but in some instances the slaves themselves sought to abolish slavery through armed uprisings.  For this reason, the trans-Atlantic African slave trade was abolished, and slavery came to an end in a handful of places in the Atlantic world such as Haiti, the northern states of the USA, and Mexico. On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution created a high demand for primary products such as raw cotton, palm oil, and coffee which depended upon slave labor. Overall, slavery was actually strengthened in Africa and much of the Americas.

Abolition of the Slave Trade

The slave trade diminished in the 1800s for a number of reasons. The US War of Independence and the French Revolution with its ideas of liberty undermined the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, sugar estate owners were losing money. Sugar beet production in Europe and overproduction in the Caribbean led to a major decline in the price of sugar while prices for slaves increased. As a result, British bankers began investing in factories rather than sugar production. Powerful industrialists in Britain supported an end to slavery because they argued that the cheap wage labor in European factories was more efficient and less expensive than plantation slavery.  As industry began to take off, Europeans more and more saw Africa as a source of raw materials and a market for mass-produced goods. Many concluded that British industrialists and merchants could only earn profits in Africa if the slave trade were abolished.

Beginning with the Atlantic Revolutions, European abolitionists and Christian missions wanted to promote “legitimate trade” in Africa. For the slave trade to be abolished, Africans needed to begin to generate wealth from other products. Gum, coffee, cotton, ground nuts, tobacco, indigo, gold, ivory, and palm oil became important trading commodities.  For the most part, Europeans hoped that Africa would develop cash crop plantations. They wanted a new Christian society based on free labor and worked with African governments to achieve this aim. So, Africa began to export low-value primary products and import higher-priced European manufactured goods. There was virtually no industry, and the African economy also became less stable as the prices of primary products fluctuated. Slave labor and other forms of coercion were increasingly used in Africa to produce these primary products.

West Central Africa

By the early 1800s, the industrializing world was searching for a reliable and cheap supply of oils to lubricate machinery and produce soap.  Previously, the Atlantic world got oil from whale fat which was expensive. Another source was oil from sesame seeds and olives from the Middle East, but the supply was unreliable.  Lards and tallows could also be used as lubricants but did not last long, because heat and moisture made them disintegrate. Rapid urbanization in Europe brought major problems because living conditions in the cities were awful. Doctors concluded that cleanliness reduces disease, but the urban poor lacked basic hygiene. Soap could be mass-produced with tropical oils such as coconut oil, palm oil, and peanut oil. So, western Europeans encouraged central West Africans to produce palm kernels, peanuts, and vegetable oil. The revolution in hygiene only became possible with a cheap supply of these oils to mass produce this soap. In Figure 5.3.1, is a painting of a palm oil plantation in Whydah (modern-day Benin) in West Africa. Several Africans are extracting the oil from the palm kernels. A European man is standing and supervising their work. What do you think his role is in the palm oil industry?  

 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The Fabrication of Palm Oil at Whydah by Édouard Auguste Nousveaux, Art Prints on Demand, in the Public Domain

Oil palm trees seen in Figure 5.3.1 are indigenous to West Africa. African men usually climbed up the trees and harvested the fruit bunches, while women and children collected the fruits that fell on the ground. The fruits were then processed into red palm oil through a very labor intensive process of boiling and filtering them with water.The prosperity of palm and peanut oil production led to migration from the interior of Africa to the coast.  However, the promotion of “legitimate trade” failed to bring an end to the slave trade. In fact, primary product production actually increased the use of enslaved people within Africa, because slavery provided a large amount of labor needed to produce palm oil and peanuts.  African slavery and the internal slave trade continued openly until well into the 1900s. 

Powerful African warlords established plantations with large numbers of slaves as a result of their military conquests. For the most part, slave-based plantation cash crop production was transferred from the Americas to Africa.  African merchants who had traded slaves now sought to monopolize the tropical oil trade. They also used enslaved laborers to transport the oils from the interior to the coasts. Although Europeans sought to stamp out the Atlantic slave trade, they did not actively seek to abolish slavery in Africa itself. They wanted these primary products at a cheap price.

The decline of the Atlantic slave trade resulted in the collapse of the Oyo Empire. There was then a power vacuum which allowed for the spread of Islam. In northern Nigeria, a large Muslim Empire known as the Sokoto Caliphate was established in 1804. Over time, Islam spread as the Sokoto would push further and further south. This Caliphate was located away from the coast and became a major supplier of slaves and slave raiding increased. Islam spread as enslaved people and the workers on estates increasingly were converted to Islam. To the south of the Sokoto Caliphate, there were four smaller Yoruba kingdoms.  These Yoruba kingdoms often fought with each other and the Sokoto Caliphate for dominance and then sold war captives as slaves.  As with the Sokoto Caliphate, the Yoruba states would conduct slave raids to the east.  It was estimated that about 445,000 people were enslaved in this region in the 1800s.

Overall, European influence in Africa was very limited until 1870. The British would try to control Africa by playing one state against another, but the Europeans were only along the coasts.  Christian missionaries gave up on trying to abolish slavery within Africa. There was no mass conversion to Christianity at this time, but mission schools were set up. For this reason, more and more Africans spoke English.

The African Interior

The interior of Africa was sparsely populated in the early 1800s. Nevertheless, the ivory trade increased once the Atlantic slave trade began to diminish. There was a high demand for ivory which was used for pianos and billiard balls because the growing middle and upper classes in the industrialized world could afford to purchase pianos and billiard tables. The ivory in Africa was softer than ivory from Asia and could be easily carved into different objects. African ivory was considered the finest, and this ivory was so valuable that it could be transported from the interior and still earn a large profit. The ivory was then sent to the west coast for the Atlantic trade or the east coast for the Indian Ocean trade.  Ivory merchants became very wealthy and then purchased more slaves.

Much of the slaves and ivory from the interior came from the Lunda Empire which emerged in central Africa during the early 1800s. This emperor sold war captives and collected slaves and ivory as a tax.  The Lunda employed skilled hunters from the nearby Chokwe Empire who used modern European firearms to hunt elephants. The Lunda emperor then kept half of all of the ivory that was collected by the Chokwe.  In general, the powerful ivory traders in the interior focused on dominating trade through the control over important rivers such as the Congo River in central Africa.

Primary Sources: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 1787      

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, debates raged in the British government as to whether the slave trade should be outlawed. In this article Olaudah Equiano sought to convince the British public that the British government should ban the Atlantic slave trade.

Discussion Questions

• How is Equiano presenting an economic argument against slavery?
• Why does he make more of an economic argument?

March the 21st, 1788, I had the honor of presenting the Queen with a petition on behalf of my African brethren, which was received most graciously by her Majesty[Y]:

As the inhuman traffic of slavery is to be taken into the consideration of the British legislature, I doubt not, if a system of commerce was established in Africa, the demand for manufactures would most rapidly augment, as the native inhabitants will insensibly adopt the British fashions, manners, customs, &c. In proportion to the civilization, so will be the consumption of British manufactures. The wear and tear of a continent, nearly twice as large as Europe, and rich in vegetable and mineral productions, is much easier conceived than calculated.

It is trading upon safe grounds. A commercial intercourse with Africa opens an inexhaustible source of wealth to the manufacturing interests of Great Britain, and to all which the slave trade is an objection. The abolition of slavery, so diabolical, will give a most rapid extension of manufactures, which is totally and diametrically opposite to what some interested people assert. The manufacturers of this country must and will, in the nature and reason of things, have a full and constant employ by supplying the African markets. The abolition of slavery would be in reality an universal good.

Tortures, murder, and every other imaginable barbarity and iniquity, are practiced upon the poor slaves with impunity. I hope the slave trade will be abolished. I pray it may be an event at hand. The great body of manufacturers, uniting in the cause, will considerably facilitate and expedite it; and, as I have already stated, it is most substantially their interest and advantage, and as such the nation’s at large, (except those persons concerned in the manufacturing neck-yokes, collars, chains, hand-cuffs, leg-bolts, drags, thumb-screws, iron muzzles, and coffins; cats, scourges, and other instruments of torture used in the slave trade). In a short time one sentiment alone will prevail, from motives of interest as well as justice and humanity.

This I conceive to be a theory founded upon facts, and therefore an infallible one. If the blacks were permitted to remain in their own country, they would double themselves every fifteen years. In proportion to such increase will be the demand for manufactures. Cotton and indigo grow spontaneously in most parts of Africa; a consideration this of no small consequence to the manufacturing towns of Great Britain. It opens a most immense, glorious, and happy prospect—the clothing, &c. of a continent ten thousand miles in circumference, and immensely rich in productions of every denomination in return for manufactures.

The Open Anthology of Literature in English, University of Virginia, is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 

Review Questions

• How did African primary products fuel the Industrial Revolution elsewhere?
• Why did slavery expand in Africa itself?