The domestic and international economic relations of the African continent

Introduction

The supply of African slaves to American plantations reached an all-time high in the late 18th century (Klein 1999). After anti-slave trade legislation finally shut down the Atlantic slave exports, commodity exports filled the gap. This so-called ‘commercial transition’ was completed in West Africa before it hit East Africa (Austen 1987, Law 2002). It was a game-changer, since it put a halt to the continuous drain of scarce labour and paved the way for the expansion of landintensive forms of tropical agriculture, engaging smallholders, communal farms, and estates.

The domestic and international economic relations of the African continent

The establishment of colonial rule over the African interior (c. 1880-1900) reinforced Africa’s commodity export growth. Colonial control facilitated the construction of railways, induced large inflows of European investment, and forced profound changes in the operation of labour and land markets (Frankema and van Waijenburg 2012). That is, colonial regimes abolished slavery, but they replaced it with other forced labour schemes. The scramble pushed African exports to new heights, but without the preceding era of commercialisation the African scramble probably would never have taken place.

Africa’s commercial transition was inextricably connected to the rising demand for industrial inputs from the industrialising core in the North Atlantic. Revolutions in transportation (railways, steamships), a move towards liberal trade policies in Europe, and increasing rates of GDP growth enhanced demand for (new) manufactures, raw materials and tropical cash crops. African producers responded to this demand by increasing exports of vegetable oils (palm oil, groundnuts), gum, ivory, gold, hides and skins. Palm oil, a key export, was highly valued as a lubricant for machinery and an ingredient in food and soap. During and after the scramble, the range of commodity exports broadened to include raw materials like rubber, cotton, and copper, as well as cash crops such as cocoa, coffee, tea and tobacco. The lion’s share of these commodities went directly to manufacturing firms and consumers in Europe. Meanwhile, technological innovations also reduced the costs of colonial occupation. These included the Maxim gun, the steamship, the railway and quinine, the latter lowering the health risks to Europeans in the disease-ridden interior of the ‘dark continent’.

The domestic and international economic relations of the African continent

To obtain a deeper understanding of the connection between Africa’s commercial transition and subsequent colonial intervention, we constructed annual time-series of export volumes, export values, commodity export prices, import prices, and the net barter terms (the ratio of average export to average import prices). The data cover the period from the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1790s to the eve of World War II,1 and make it possible to analyse the commercial transition with much greater precision than was possible previously and to compare the development of African trade with other commodity exporting regions (Williamson 2011).

There was a prolonged rise in the net barter terms of trade for sub-Saharan Africa from the 1790s to the 1880s, a commodity price boom that was especially pronounced in the four decades between 1845 and 1885. Figure 1 shows that this secular price boom peaked exactly at the date of the Berlin conference (1884-5), when diplomats negotiated how to carve up Africa among the European imperialists. The terms of trade tripled in just four decades. While the terms of trade for commodity exporters were rising everywhere in what was once called the Third World, nowhere was the boom greater than for Africa. Furthermore, the scramble started right at the moment when African exports reached their highest exchange value.

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