Introduction

Global commodity chains—from Asia to Europe to West Africa—were of crucial importance to the development of plantation slavery in the “New World.” The concept of commodity chains was developed in the 1980s and further elaborated in parallel with the accelerated deregulation of the global economy. Originally conceived for the contemporary era, it helps to understand the world-encompassing flows of raw materials, components, and finished products along with the significant expansion of these flows after the end of the Cold War—and their impact on the working and living conditions of the people involved in them, from production to consumption. It also highlights the connections between places, people, and social and economic practices distant from each other only in geographic terms.1 The concept can be applied very appropriately to the early modern economy, since that economy in many respects has more in common with the deregulated globalized world of the twenty-first century than with that of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which was characterized by protectionism, Fordism, and—from 1945—the ideological dichotomies of the Cold War. Early commodity chains illustrate how economic interests, the hierarchies among the involved actors, the factor endowments of certain regions, and the ensuing labor divisions and logistics shaped flows of goods and people, making plantation slavery and the processing of its produce a profitable business. A thorough understanding of the rise of Atlantic slavery must take into account the global commodity chains that made it possible and kept it going into the Age of Emancipation.

Long-distance trade networks in commodities both within and between Europe, Asia, and Africa had already expanded significantly since the late medieval period, well before European conquest of the Americas, and it was these networks that most profoundly influenced and helped fuel the development of New World plantation slavery. Since the late medieval period, industrious urbanized regions had been largely unhampered in connecting maritime catchment areas with specific rural areas—notably, Northern Italy with regard to the Mediterranean, or the Netherlands with regard to the Baltic Sea region. Cities were able to regulate production, wages, and prices within their confines, as well as the import and export of goods. Rural areas produced staple goods, like grain in Poland or metalware in Sweden and Tyrol, as well as upmarket products like wine in the southwest of France or fine woolens in Flanders, England, and Italy. Italian merchants traded with North Africa (sub-Saharan gold for German metalware, textiles from Italy and Castile, etc.) and with the Levant and Black Sea regions (for raw and finished cotton from India, spices, sugar, silk, porcelain, tea from China, etc.).2 Trading diasporas with a variety of ethnoreligious backgrounds (Arab, Jewish, Armenian, Persian, etc.) organized the trade between Europe and southwestern Asia, traversing Ottoman and Persian territories. Arab, Indian, Malay, and Chinese ship-owning merchants connected Persian waters with the hinterlands of the Indian Ocean and the China Seas, and caravan routes (labeled the “Silk Road” only much later) linked regions extending from the Black Sea to the Far East on land. Even before Vasco da Gama’s voyage, producers and merchants in vast areas of the “Old World” thus had more or less precise knowledge about which goods were available where, as well as about prices, qualities, and demand. Among these regions, the Middle East along with much of India and China were more urbanized—and commercially and technologically more advanced—than Western Europe. As a result, they also offered more sophisticated goods. From antiquity until well into the nineteenth century, it was thus a constant pattern in trade for European merchants and consumers to be attracted by Asian products rather than vice versa. Indian cottons represent a typical example for Asian superiority. They were far more attractive in color and more comfortable to wear than most linen cloth, the European staple fabric. In the late seventeenth century, when “modest imitations [made of imported cotton fibers and yarns] […] were increasingly produced in Europe,” these fashionable items became available to ever larger segments of the population. Contemporaries lamented a “calico craze.”3 European-made high-quality metals, glassware, and woolens were among the few exceptions of commodities in demand in Eastern markets. In general, Europeans could not pay for the desired Asian products with barter goods; instead, they had to use precious metals, which were hardly mined in Asia. This also explains the European demand for African gold as well as the intensification of European silver mining: They were prerequisites for any trade with the East from antiquity. By the time of the European conquest of the Americas, broad trading networks between Europe, Asia, and Africa were thus already well-established.

The conquest and colonization of tropical and subtropical regions in the New World altered these commodity flows, enabling Europeans to develop plantation agriculture and produce many originally Asian commodities themselves, thereby controlling the entire chain from plantation to finished good. In a sense, they created their own Asia in the Americas. The most prominent of these commodities were cotton, indigo, coffee, and sugar, all originating in the East. The only thing the European colonies lacked was an abundant population to be coerced to toil on the plantations. The plantation owners thus had around 12.5 million enslaved Africans deported across the Atlantic Ocean.4 The terms of trade defined by the African sellers of these slaves shaped yet another commodity flow and its associated chains: that of the barter goods they demanded.5

This injection essay illuminates the impact of commodity chains on New World slavery by focusing on one of the plantation products bound for Europe—sugar—as well as two of the most important barter commodities destined for Africa: textiles and metalware. It underscores the importance of global trade networks that linked Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the early modern period.

Sugar

Sugar production was the single most important motor for European expansion into the Atlantic World. Sugar cane was presumably first used by humans on Papua New Guinea around 8000 years ago. From there, the practice of growing cane and extracting the sweet juice spread to China and India. The process for reducing the juice to crystal sugar was most likely developed around 500 C.E. in the Middle East. For the first time, food could be sweetened without adding another flavor, as was the case with honey, the only available alternative. In medieval Western Europe, only the very elite—kings, the pope, the emperor—could afford a very modest consumption of this substance.6

During the Crusades, Europeans learned the technologies for growing and processing sugar cane from prisoners of war as well as via peaceful knowledge exchange with the Arab world. The extremely high market price for sugar attracted investments in plantations and the expensive sugar mills. Beginning in the twelfth century, Venetian merchants and military orders like the Templars established plantations on Cyprus and Crete. Alongside free workers, they also employed unfree laborers—prisoners of war as well as slaves imported into the Mediterranean from Black Sea shores by Venetians and Genoese.7 The sugar they made was shipped to Europe and distributed at exorbitant prices. By the fifteenth century, sugar plantations had spread to Sicily, the Spanish Mediterranean coast, and the Algarve—and after the 1450s, to the Canary Islands and previously uninhabited Madeira. The Portuguese brought African slaves to Madeira to work the sugar plantations, and on the Canaries, Africans were forced to labor alongside smaller numbers of indigenous workers. The subtropical climate allowed for much higher yields than those obtained in the Mediterranean, but it also required huge investments for irrigation systems and field terracing. Much of the necessary capital came from bankers in Genoa, Florence, and Venice who had previously been involved in Mediterranean sugar production, as well as from Germany’s fifteenth- and sixteenth-century banking center Augsburg. With larger volumes of sugar pouring into the markets, which now extended as far as Northwestern Europe, prices slowly began to drop from 200 times the price per weight of wheat around 1430 to roughly the 30-fold mark around 1500. Consumption began to trickle down the social strata.8

In the late medieval period, the key features of this (early) modern, capital-intensive agroindustry were already in place. First, (sub)tropical regions were colonized for the purpose of growing a cash crop that could not be cultivated in Europe. Second, a non-European population was enslaved and forced to work in distant regions under climatic conditions Europeans preferred to avoid. Third, the regions depended not only on the influx of workers but also on food imports, since cash crop monocultures are more profitable than mixed farming. Fourth, the product was not meant for consumption in the region, but instead for distant markets with the adequate purchasing power. And fifth, rent-seeking capital was a crucial driver in the development of plantation agriculture from the very beginning.

At the low end of the sugar commodity chain, the entire plantation community was built around the requirements of profitable sugar production. The plantation made the community, and this applied even more on distant islands and—from the 1490s—in the Americas. It is most obvious in the use of violence to transport Africans across the Atlantic and subject them to a brutal labor regime. Brutal methods were also employed against European indentured servants taken to the Caribbean from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. The work of both groups—comparably fewer indentured whites and the many enslaved Blacks—enabled the massive expansion of sugar production starting around 1680, when the “Sugar Revolution” transformed the British and French Caribbean islands. Accordingly, the number of captives deported from Africa rose from an average of 9700 per year in 1650–1690 to around 47,600 per year in 1691–1790. The majority were sold to sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil.9 In comparison to most other cash crops like tobacco (one of the few originating in the Americas), cotton, or coffee, the slaves working in the sugar sector experienced the harshest labor conditions and more violence, as well as toiling in some of the most insalubrious humid climates; as a result, they had the lowest life expectancy among all workers in the plantation industry.

At the upper end of the chain, sugar transformed social patterns of consumption. Increasing volumes were already being used in Europe before the late seventeenth century, when sugar became popular. Yet in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, it was still a luxury product. Since the 1470s, techniques for creating miniature figures of humans and animals as well as entire depictions of urban landscapes made of sugar had been developed in Italy for festivities of nobles and patricians, who would eat the objects after having marveled at them. From the 1530s, when Antwerp had become an important center for marketing sugar, these “bancquets de confitures et de succades” became common at events hosted by princes and aristocrats in Northwestern Europe as well. Portugal and the Low Countries were among the first regions to see the consumption of sweet pastries, jams, and preserves spreading to the middling and even lower classes. Sugar consumption further expanded with the rise of coffee, tea, and hot chocolate, which became more readily available starting in the late seventeenth century. With each of these stimulants and the sweetener accompanying it, a specific panoply of jugs, cups, bowls, and spoons—preferably made of silver and bone china, or at least of high-quality earthenware—came into use. By the mid-eighteenth century, consumption in England, which then led Europe in sugar use, reached around six kilograms per capita per year; this number would increase to more than ten kilograms by 1800. Over the following decades, preserves became a staple food of the emerging working class, driving up consumption even further.10

With labor and fuel being expensive in the plantation regions, large quantities of sugar were not refined on site but instead in Europe. Much of this finishing occurred in more easterly seaports like Trieste and Hamburg, where labor was cheaper than in prime sugar-receiving cities like Bordeaux or London. From the mid-eighteenth century, Central Europe absorbed increasing volumes of sugar that had been refined in Amsterdam and, more importantly, Hamburg. Most of it came from the extremely productive French Caribbean.11

Along this commodity chain, profits were made by the plantation owners, by financiers contracted to levy the duties on sugar arriving in European ports, by the crowns and maritime republics that ultimately claimed those duties, by refiners who finished raw sugar in European ports, and by wholesale merchants and retailers who distributed it across Europe. The key profiteers were financiers active in several of these sectors, such as the leading French bankers Samuel Bernard (1651–1739) and Antoine Crozat (1655–1738), who helped to finance the “Sugar Revolution” in the sugar-producing powerhouse Saint-Domingue.12 National economies as a whole benefitted as well: In the Netherlands, in sample years around 1770 and 1790, sugar and coffee produced by chattel slaves accounted for roughly 16 percent of the total trade value (including imports and exports).13 Pre-industrial economic growth rates were low, and additional growth from the entirely new colonial sector therefore had a significant impact.

Textiles

Even before the fifteenth-century Portuguese expansion along the African coast, European and Asian commodities had reached sub-Saharan markets via caravan routes. Important export items traded in return were high-value goods like gold, salt, ivory, pepper, precious woods—and enslaved people mostly destined for the Muslim world extending from North Africa to Persia. African merchants and consumers were thus already familiar with a wide range of commodities and qualities, which they subsequently demanded when the Portuguese began to buy African slaves for Madeira, Portugal, and—from the sixteenth century on—increasingly for Brazil and Spanish America. The barter goods traded for slaves did not consist of “defective firearms, cheap liquor, tawdry trinkets, and useless luxuries,” as some narratives would have us believe, but “from start to finish [of] practical cloth and metal goods” as well as many other items. Inventories from the Dutch trading post of El Mina on the Gold Coast illustrate this variety. The number of different items—all sorts of textiles, glass and metalware, tobacco, alcohols, etc.—stored there stood at 92 in 1645, and at roughly 220 by 1728.14 These decades also saw a massive expansion of the slave trade as well as a relative decline in volume of the abovementioned African export goods. Textiles made up half of the total value of goods exchanged for captive men, women, and children on the African coasts by Europeans.

The sale of the enslaved was typically controlled by local rulers, who demanded certain amounts of premium goods as market entry fees. Only then were European (later also Brazilian and North American) buyers allowed to begin their bargaining with the African traders. Certain European and Asian goods had long been in use for conspicuous consumption, but also for ritual purposes. Their influx increased with the transatlantic slave trade, and their patterns of consumption soon trickled down the social strata and spread into regions more distant from the coast—similar to the way plantation products were spreading across Europe. Monarchs like the kings of Dahomey as well as minor rulers and the African slave traders had privileged access to these goods, which added to their social power.15

They were at the upper end of a commodity chain that had to satisfy a buyers’ market. Each slaving expedition absorbed a huge advance investment for outfitting the ship, maritime insurance, mariners’ wages, and for the largest cost category: the barter goods. Mortality among the slave ship crews was very high, especially while “coasting”—the weeks and months it took to fill the ship’s hold with the enslaved. African traders were aware of the time pressure under which slave ship captains operated. The captains were also entrusted with negotiating with the sellers, and they made sure to bring goods that would meet West African preferences and tastes. By the eighteenth century, many captains came equipped with pattern books issued by European textile producers so that African slave traders could order the latest fashion, even if it would arrive only upon a ship’s return the following year.16 The assortments included textiles from all over Eurasia: linen from Northwestern and Central Europe, woolens from Flanders and Britain, silk from Persia and China, cotton-and-silk fabrics, calicoes from India, and increasingly from the eighteenth century, European counterfeits of Indian cottons. A large share of the textiles shipped to Europe by the English, Dutch, and French East India Companies were in fact destined for African markets via slaving ports such as Liverpool, Middelburg, and Nantes. Another important market for textiles were the plantation economies. The slaves’ work wear meted out to them by their owners was usually linen, since its fibers are far more robust than cotton.

One reason for the competitiveness of Indian and Central European fabrics was their quality, another the comparatively low cost of labor. Wages and prices in the Western Hemisphere were generally higher because Spanish American silver was constantly expanding the money supply. The differences in wages and prices between Europe and Asia—as well as within Europe itself—were considerable, giving more easterly regions a competitive edge in labor-intensive segments like textile production. They seized ever larger portions of the market as the volume of the transatlantic slave trade increased during the eighteenth century, with old-established linen regions like Flanders, Normandy, and Brittany stagnating or even falling into decline. Fine linen from the eastern German province of Silesia thus competed on African markets with certain Indian cottons. Labor costs in Silesia were driven further down by a combination of cottage industry and the institution of serfdom, which existed unofficially in Silesia well into the 1840s and which forced peasants to produce certain amounts of linen per year without pay. These were collected by linen merchants established in the provincial towns and sold to Western European slaving ports at cutting-edge prices.17 In India, too, conditions were adapted in order to increase outputs and curb labor costs. All the port cities controlled by European East India Companies—Madras, Bombay, Pondicherry, etc.—saw protoindustrial textile production spreading in their immediate hinterlands to supply the rapidly expanding European demand. Like other crafts in India, textile making was associated with specific castes, which made it difficult to simply hire more weavers. One solution was that weaver castes would “adopt” members from outside, another was that higher and lower caste weavers were employed on the same looms but at different times—the latter on night shifts and producing coarser fabrics. In the morning, the looms were subjected to a purifying ritual before the higher caste weavers started their day. The textile merchants would wear gloves when touching the bales woven overnight.18

In many Central European textile regions, the additional income from weaving improved the living conditions of families or allowed young people to marry, since only this previously inexistent income gave them access to a marriage permit. Urban textile merchants sought to control this rural workforce, namely by imposing mobility restrictions, as was the case in Swiss linen regions, for example.19 It was presumably the Silesian serfs who were at the very low end of this commodity chain: Immobilized in the province, facing population growth and rising bread prices, they were forced to work ever more in order to survive.20

In any case, it was protoindustrial regions that bore the bulk of population growth in eighteenth-century Central Europe. At the same time, the forced transportation of millions from West Africa and the violence spreading in connection with mass enslavement caused demographic stagnation and even decline in this world region.

Metals

Metal and metal products (including melee weapons and firearms) made up for around 15 percent of all the barter goods for Africa, ranking second behind textiles. Mining and processing of iron and copper were highly developed in Africa, but local ores and the lack of some important alloy materials prevented the production of certain qualities. At least since the medieval period, sub-Saharan Africa therefore imported semi-finished metals for local artisans as well as brassware, knives, sabers, and other wares. Among these, certain standardized items like brass rods also served as currency. West African crafters used a large share of the imported copper alloys to create figurines and other sculpted objects that became famous as the Benin Bronzes.

When the Portuguese began to engage in slave trading (initially on a rather modest scale), the African sellers of slaves demanded the high-quality copper alloys they already knew, especially brass. Rich yields of non-sulfidic ores in the region of Aachen made brass-producing Rhenish merchants like Erasmus Schetz (c. 1476–1550) top suppliers for Africa. From the mid-sixteenth century, the Fugger dynasty also became a major purveyor of metalware. Originating from a linen-weaving village near Augsburg, the Fuggers eventually made their way to banking and then to copper mining all over Central Europe. By 1504, they had their own branch in Lisbon—initially for shipping copper to India, but soon supplying Portuguese slave ships with huge quantities of brassware as well. A 1548 contract with the Portuguese crown lists tens of thousands of saucepans, bowls, barbers’ basins, and cauldrons along with 7500 hundredweights of “manillas” (bangle-like brass objects). Large amounts of such items (including iron chains to fetter the enslaved) were produced in Nuremberg and went into the African trade via Flanders.21 By the eighteenth century, much of the copper and brass manufacturing for African markets was being done in Swansea, Bristol, Bath, in and around London and some more places in Northwestern Europe. British smelting technology, the use of coke as an energy source, and the rise of its own plantation empire had caused this shift of the industry to Britain. Its bulkiest products were not destined for Africa but instead for sugar plantations all across the “New World”: the huge copper kettles for the boiling houses of the sugar mills in which the cane juice was transformed into crystal sugar. They were wear parts that had to be replaced frequently.22

Another metal item for West Africa consisted of bars of malleable iron, popular with local blacksmiths who used the semi-finished material to forge tools for artisans and agriculture. Some of this so-called “voyage iron” was produced in the Rhineland, but most of it in Sweden, with serf-like conditions for many workers. Like in the case of Silesian linen, the commodity chain of Swedish iron involved coerced labor at both ends—in the initial production of the commodity, and as the object (slaves) it was used to paid for. Like “Guinea rods” and a certain range of textiles, voyage iron was standardized and also served as a currency. The impact of European iron on African markets was owed to the productivity of the early blast furnaces developed in Europe in the eighteenth century. Their water-driven bellows coupled with a reliable supply of coke or charcoal drove down production costs. Even though African iron manufacturing—typically clustered in savannah woodlands, for example in Mali or northern Togo—was very sophisticated, imported iron was in high demand in the coastal rainforest regions, where it was converted into axes and hoes needed to clear forests and swamps to enable the growing of indigenous rice and the newly introduced American crop of maize. The subsequent nutritional input stabilized a population living under the constant pressure of slave-raiding. “In that sense, voyage iron helped sustain the export of enslaved people,” as Chris Evans and Göran Rydén recently argued—even if some of the imported metal was converted into weapons used to fend off slave raiders.23

Captives are produced by means of violence, which is one of the reasons why West Africa also imported increasing amounts of firearms. The Portuguese crown did not allow its slave traders to introduce them in Africa so as not to jeopardize the Portuguese hegemony along the Congo and Angola coasts, but the other slave-trading nations did. The figures are contested, but around 1730, West Africa may have absorbed as much as 180,000 guns per year; from 1750 to 1810, the figure probably oscillated between 280,000 and 390,000 per year. Over the entire period from 1730 to 1810, a total of perhaps 18 million firearms would thus have found their way into the region, contributing to the militarization of slave-trading states like Dahomey. Specifically designed for the African demand, they originated from gun manufactures in places like Flanders, Thuringia, Denmark, and most prominently Birmingham.24

Industrious Revolution and Industrial Revolution

Further sidelines of production and trade in Africa emerged from the transatlantic slave trade as well, like the export of gum arabic from the Senegambia coast. These commodity chains have often been overlooked. Gum arabic was of crucial importance for the European calico industry, which needed it for the process of cotton dying.25 Wishing to have larger numbers of slaves available for sale whenever the opportunity came up, major slave traders in coastal West Africa employed them on plantations in order to curb the cost of their maintenance. From the mid-eighteenth century, palm oil became the most important product from such plantations: It was increasingly in demand as a lubricant for Europe’s early industries, as a fuel for lamps, and for making soaps and cosmetics. Over the decades, many African entrepreneurs became more reluctant to sell captives, as they were now needed on local plantations.26 This led to a rise in slave prices on both sides of the Atlantic. The campaign of abolitionists, a surge of larger and smaller slave revolts in the Americas since the 1790s, and this rise in slave prices ultimately led to the abolition of slavery in the Americas.

The commodities studied in this injection essay—especially sugar and fashionable textiles—were objects of conspicuous consumption. Consumer demand for plantation produce like sugar in Europe, and for European and Indian textiles in Africa, and so forth, did in fact fuel the enslavement of people in West Africa and their exploitation in the Americas. While European economic development from the mid-seventeenth century was certainly driven by an increasing desire for new consumer goods (domestic products, but also plantation produce), motivating most strata of early modern society to give up leisure time for longer working hours and thus more purchasing power, this is only one part of the story.27 Many of the new consumer goods that triggered the “Industrious Revolution” of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century only became available because a specific type of forced industriousness had been imposed on millions of enslaved people in the Americas. As Nuala Zahedie recently argued:

Few consumers fully understood their own direct involvement in the American marketplace, and the production of imported luxuries, or recognized their links to enslaved workers in the Caribbean but, in fact, workers on both sides of the Atlantic were inextricably chained together in a complex process of economic and social change.28

Eric Williams’ seminal 1944 book on “Capitalism & Slavery” sparked a debate on whether the slave trade and plantation slavery fueled the process of industrialization in Britain.29 Commodity chains illustrate that the impact of this transatlantic economy extended far beyond the eighteenth century’s leading slave-trading nation and deep into Continental Europe, even contributing to the imposition of (semi)serfdom on textile, glass, and metalworkers in Silesia, Bohemia, and Sweden. The production of commodities for African markets and supplies for the plantations, along with the influx of plantation products into Europe, did in fact promote population growth and the accumulation of wealth on the European continent. By contrast, the demographic losses caused by slave-raiding as well as the influx of huge volumes of manufactures and their control by slave-trading elites were anything but beneficial for economies and societies in Africa. African export goods like gum arabic or palm oil were raw materials used for the production of higher-value goods in Europe. Eric Williams’ assumption that direct profits from the slave trade were essential for investments in industrialization has long been dismissed, but the slave-labor economy did create markets for European-made products, and African demand fostered technological progress such as in the British brass industry. Joseph Inikori emphasized the crucial importance of such exports for national economies.30 Producing barter goods and supplies for plantations most likely did not yield more profit than the slave trade itself, but it involved far less risk and triggered technical innovation in various sectors of manufacturing, laying the foundations for a sustainable process of industrialization in Europe.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Andrea Komlosy and Goran Musić, “Chains of Labor: Connecting Global Labor History and the Commodity Chain Paradigm,” in Commodity Chains and Labor Relations, ed. Andrea Komlosy and Goran Musić (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 1–26.

  2. 2.

    Peter Feldbauer and John Morrissey, “Italiens Kolonialexpansion. Östlicher Mittelmeerraum und die Küsten des Schwarzen Meeres,” in Mediterraner Kolonialismus. Expansion und Kulturaustausch im Mittelmeer, ed. Peter Feldbauer, Gottfried Liedl and John Morrissey (Essen: Magnus, 2005), 157–73; Nikolas Jasper, “Austausch-, Transfer- und Abgrenzungsprozesse. Der Mittelmeerraum,“ in Globalgeschichte: Die Welt 1250–1500, ed. Thomas Ertl and Michael Limberger (Wien: Mandelbaum, 2006), 138–74, see 152–58.

  3. 3.

    Giorgio Riello, “The Globalization of Cotton Textiles: Indian Cottons, Europe, and the Atlantic World, 1600–1850,” in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 261–87, at 267–73.

  4. 4.

    https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database, 11/12/2021.

  5. 5.

    Stanley B. Alpern, “What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods,” History in Africa 22 (1995): 5–43.

  6. 6.

    Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1985), 79–87.

  7. 7.

    Hannah Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

  8. 8.

    Alberto Viera, “Sugar Islands: The Sugar Economy of Madeira and the Canaries, 1450–1650,” in Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680, ed. Stuart Schwartz (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 42–84.

  9. 9.

    The total between 1651 and 1690 was around 388,900; of these, around 311,500 survived the voyage. The total between 1691 and 1790 was around 4,765,500, with 4,119,500 surviving. https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database, 11/12/2021.

  10. 10.

    Eddy Stols, “The Expansion of the Sugar Market in Western Europe,” in Tropical Babylons, ed. Stuart Schwartz (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 237–88, at 270–75; Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 3–8, 128–31.

  11. 11.

    Tamira Combrink, “From French Harbours to German Rivers: European Distribution of Sugar by the Dutch in the Eighteenth Century,” in La diffusion des produits ultra-marins en Europe (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles), ed. Marguerite Martin and Maud Villeret (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018), 39–54, at 40–44.

  12. 12.

    Karsten Voss and Klaus Weber, “Their Most Valuable and Most Vulnerable Asset: Slaves on the Early Sugar Plantations of Saint-Domingue (1697–1715),” Journal of Global Slavery 5 (2020): 204–37, at 209–14.

  13. 13.

    Tamira Combrink, “Slave-Based Coffee in the Eighteenth Century and the Role of the Dutch in Global Commodity Chains,” Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 1 (2021): 15–42, at 29.

  14. 14.

    Alpern, “What Africans Got for Their Slaves,” 6.

  15. 15.

    Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History (New York: Altamira, 2009), 34–39.

  16. 16.

    Thomas David, Bouda Etemad, and Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, La Suisse et l’esclavage des noirs, (Lausanne: Éditions Antipodes, 2005), 22.

  17. 17.

    Anka Steffen, “A Cloth That Binds: New Perspectives on the Eighteenth-Century Prussian Economy,” Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 1 (2021): 105–29, at 112.

  18. 18.

    David Washbrook, “The Textile Industry and the Economy of South India, 1500–1800,” in How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 172–91, at 183.

  19. 19.

    Susanna Burghartz and Madeleine Herren, Building Paradise: A Basel Manor House and its Residents in a Global Perspective (Basel: Merian, 2021), 99–101.

  20. 20.

    Anka Steffen and Klaus Weber, “Spinning and Weaving for the Slave Trade: Proto-industry in Eighteenth-Century Silesia,” in Slavery Hinterland: Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680–1850, ed. Felix Brahm and Eve Rosenhaft (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 87–107.

  21. 21.

    Marian Małowist, “Portuguese Expansion in Africa and European Economy at the Turn of the 15th Century,” in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and World Development, 13th–18th Centuries: Collection of Essays of Marian Małowist, ed. Jean Batou and Henryk Szlajfer (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 373–93.

  22. 22.

    Chris Evans, Slave Wales: The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery, 1660–1850 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010); Nuala Zahedie, “Copper, Colonies and the Market for Inventive Activities,” The Economic History Review 66, no. 3 (2013): 805–25.

  23. 23.

    Chris Evans and Göran Rydén, “‘Voyage Iron’: An Atlantic Slave Trade Currency, Its European Origins, and West African Impact,” Past & Present 239, no. 1 (2018): 41–70, at 43.

  24. 24.

    Joseph E. Inikori, “The Import of Firearms into West Africa, 1750–1807: A Quantitative Analysis,” The Journal of African History 18 (1977): 339–68; W. A. Richards, “The Import of Firearms into West Africa in the Eighteenth Century,” The Journal of African History 21, no. 1 (1980), 43–59.

  25. 25.

    Jutta Wimmler, “From Senegal to Augsburg: Gum Arabic and the Central European Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century,” Textile History 50, no. 1 (2019), 4–22.

  26. 26.

    Angus E. Dalrymple-Smith, Commercial Transitions and Abolition in West Africa 1630–1860 (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

  27. 27.

    Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  28. 28.

    Nuala Zahedie, “Eric Williams and William Forbes: Copper, Colonial Markets, and Commercial Capitalism,” The Economic History Review Volume 74, no. 3 (2021), 784–808, at 805.

  29. 29.

    Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

  30. 30.

    Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 477–79.