It's logical, as the "Western" discussions, debates and studies on it are dating from sometime now. But it isn't normal, especially as it isn't about European colonial propaganda about the slave trade nor about myth-making Arab slave trade and Indian Ocean trade by internet pundits. It's just that European society started to question the slave trade rather early, something that didn't happened in the Oriental counterpart. Slave trade remained almost unquestioned as late as 20th c. in the Mideastern societies.
That brings another issue: data (even rough guestimates) are extremely few, difficult to have (if acces isn't just denied) for the Oriental part, unlike for the Western part. Which occults the full image and it's transforming the real African slave trade phenomenon and its implications into the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its implications which is a partial and truncated approach image. It's ignoring no less than 700 years of history and two of the three actors involved in that trade (=> Arab and African).
What actually happened is that when the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended Asante started importing slaves for use in its own society to an even greater degree than it had ever done before. If the paper by Austin had been freely accessible, this would have been very easy to see. I didn't state this initially simply because it was one of the things I was going to mention in passing in my longer responses to robto.
I do appreciate you bringing in another aspect to the discussion that may have been under-emphasized or overlooked, but I think that your speculation here is not quite getting the point I was making with regard to Asante specifically. I emphasized that Asante's economy was agriculturally based for a reason and I was, in a subsequent post to robto, going to mention why I brought up Austin's article: to emphasize that its agricultural production, and subsequently its trade with the states and peoples to its north increased substantially and that this is most likely why it didn't take a hit or decline when the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended: it was always exporting agricultural products to its north to begin with, and simply increased the volume of those exports, while increasing its importation of slaves
into the Asante state.
Asante was not some big player or even a noticeable player in any part of the the "Oriental" slave trade. That is just not what Asante's economy was ever based on and also not what happened in the 19th century.
Actually, a state in the Gold Coast/Ghana area being a slave importer rather than exporter was not even something new. When the Portuguese were first active in the area (the Gold Coast) in the late 15th century and early 16th century, they were actually importing slaves into the Gold Coast (selling African slaves to peoples and polities in the Gold Coast) that the Portuguese had obtained from the southern part of what would later be Nigeria (and some other areas) and obtaining gold through those sales. Basically the Gold Coast was initially exporting gold to the the Portuguese, and later some other Europeans for a while, and was initially primarily importing, rather than exporting slaves. Gold was the principal export from the Gold Coast up until about the late 17th century when slaves were exported in sufficient volume that that trade could compete with gold exports.
Robin Law's article "The ‘golden age’ in the history of the Gold Coast: the seventeenth century" discusses this phenomenon in the first two pages of the paper:
"It is commonly held that the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on western Africa was negative and destructive, in narrowly economic as well as social and moral terms, since it involved the withdrawal of labour from the local economy, and stimulated violence and disorder which disrupted other economic activities. Contrariwise, it is commonly argued or assumed that the export of other commodities than slaves would have been more beneficial in terms of economic growth and development. It should be stressed, however, that the idea of alternative patterns of engagement with the world economy is not a purely counterfactual one, since in the early phase of European trade several areas of West Africa did export commodities other than (or alongside) slaves, including gold, ivory, and various sorts of agricultural or sylvan produce, such as pepper, dyewoods, and gum Arabic, although slaves had become paramount by the eighteenth century.1 In such cases, where other commodities were initially exported, but were then replaced by slaves, it should in principle be possible (depending, of course, on the extent and quality of the evidence) to test the proposition about the differential impacts of alternative trades empirically. The paramount instance was the Gold Coast (roughly, modern Ghana), which supplied mainly gold for the first two centuries of European contact (beginning in 1471) and shifted into slaves only from the late 17th century. The Gold Coast is also, largely because of its role as a supplier of gold, which led to the establishment there of permanent trading posts by most of the European nations involved in the trade, an area whose early history is, by West African standards, exceptionally well-documented. The Gold Coast also offers the opportunity of comparison with the region immediately to the east, which became known as the ‘Slave Coast’ (modern Togo, Bénin, and south-western Nigeria), which was always (until the 19th century) a supplier mainly of slaves.2
In the historiography of the Gold Coast, there is a strongly embedded view that the period of gold exports was one of positive economic growth (and indeed, ‘development’), until this was negated by the disruptive effects of the slave trade. This view was influentially articulated by Walter Rodney, in a journal article published in 1969.3 Rodney discussed the transition of the Gold Coast, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, from being an exporter of gold to an exporter of slaves, and in particular drew attention to the arresting fact that in the earliest phase of Atlantic gold exports, the Gold Coast was not only uninvolved in the sale of slaves to Europeans, but was actually an
importer of slaves. The Portuguese in the late 15th and early 16th centuries purchased slaves (together with locally made cotton cloth and beads) on the Slave Coast to the east, to re-sell on the Gold Coast in exchange for gold. It is unclear precisely how long this slave trade to the Gold Coast persisted, but it had clearly come to an end by the mid-17th century, when the Dutch (having replaced the Portuguese on the Gold Coast) were still buying cloth and beads on the Slave Coast for re-sale on the Gold Coast, but there is no longer any reference to slaves. (The Dutch – and other Europeans later – did import slaves from the Slave Coast to the Gold Coast, but seemingly only for their own use, in their coastal factories, rather than for sale to Africans.)4 Rodney also noted that, contrariwise, in the 18th century, when slaves had become the major export from the Gold Coast, the region now became an importer of gold, which Europeans paid to purchase slaves: this imported gold was initially mainly imported from Brazil by the Portuguese, but in the second half of the century from the coast to the west of the central Gold Coast.5"
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In that same article (on p. 10) Law makes another relevant comment:
"There remains, of course, the critical point that the Gold Coast in the 17th century was importing labour, in the form of slaves, while the Slave Coast was exporting it. However, although it may seem clear that the Slave Coast region as a whole suffered depopulation through the slave trade,57 this was not necessarily true of particular societies within it. The major states of the Slave Coast – Allada, Hueda, and later Dahomey- in addition to exporting slaves, also employed slaves locally in considerable numbers.58 These were presumably mainly obtained by purchase or capture from outside, rather than through the enslavement of their own citizens. So, in fact, these areas may well have enjoyed population growth, at the same time as exporting slaves – as was probably also true of Asante in the Gold Coast in the 18th century. Of course, the demographic (and hence economic) cost of slaving was simply transferred onto other areas- weaker neighbouring communities, which were raided for slaves, or areas further inland, from which they were bought for re-sale at the coast. But this was equally true of the import of slaves into the Gold Coast – which benefited at the expense of the areas from which the slaves were transferred."
The article (which can be accessed freely from one of the two links above; one can actually download it from the first link) is a pretty interesting analysis of the more complex situation in that region.
Anyway, this complex situation is an example of why I emphasized to robto that some kind of specialized/focused studies were needed to get an understanding of these things. I think that if you had a more thorough knowledge of the region and the specifics of the various polities there, then you probably would not be speculating or implying that Asante suddenly became some sort of major player in the trans-Saharan slave trade, even if you hadn't already read Austin's paper where he discusses the increase in Asante agricultural production and exports to the Sahel, and the increase in slave importation into Asante in the 19th century.
You both mentioned the commerce, the European pressure, monopoly and the rest (rightfully). But for more than 1 millennium trade involving Africa was based on African slaves. African slaves were one of the most appreciated merchandise. They were the equivalent of the Oriental spices, of Western manufactured goods. I know it's sounding crude and heartless nowadays, but it's how it was at the time: Africans were the best merchandise. It wasn't a plantation or a workshop needing constant labour, investment and care. And there wasn't the risk to see the source tarnishing.
I do think there is some misunderstanding here. The east African slave trade did not really pick up in volume/scale until the 18th and 19th centuries. It had existed before that, but not at a scale where one could talk of that being the chief export from east Africa. For the trans-Saharan trade, while slaves were a significant part of that for many centuries, the volume of slaves exported during that longer period of time that it lasted (when compared to the trans-Atlantic trade) was much lower at any given point, and the trade was most likely lower in absolute numbers as well; meaning essentially that there were many slaves being exported but at a lower rate when compared to the trans-Atlantic slave trade (it was a more drawn out process basically; lower volume but over a longer period of time than the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and most likely a smaller absolute/total number of slaves exported as well). Additionally, the trans-Saharan trade was not necessarily dominated by, or often did not consist primarily of, slaves. Gold, ivory, ostrich feathers, tanned skins/leathers/textiles were also a huge component of this trans-Saharan trade and for some periods were most likely more significant than slaves as an export. Additionally it has to be kept in mind that the salt trade between the desert (the Sahara) and the Sahel (primarily the western and central Sudan) had a huge volume (this is analyzed in the article "Commercial Sectors in the Economy of the Nineteenth-Century Central Sudan: The Trans-Saharan Trade and the Desert-Side Salt Trade" (1984) by Paul E. Lovejoy), and considering that the trade for salt was, for centuries, primarily in gold rather than other items, this would mean that the high volume of the gold-salt trade between the Sahel and the Sahara makes it unlikely that slaves were the really the biggest export of Sahelian Africa to areas to its north.
en.wikipedia.org
