Eltis, David and Lawrence Jennings. "Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era". The American Historical Review, Vol.93, No.4 (1988): 936-959.

Eltis, David and Lawrence Jennings. "Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era". The American Historical Review, Vol.93, No.4 (1988): 936-959.

• Europeans throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries advocated the introduction of European manufactured goods into Africa, believing that Africans would get hooked on these products as Europeans had on American tobacco and thus supporting the expansion of consistent markets for European exports and the involvement of Africa in the Atlantic economy (936).
• Africa was significantly involved in the Atlantic economy from before the 1700s, with American, French, and British trade making up 83% of all imports and exports in 1868 and at least 2/3 of trade by 1700, with the Portuguese making up a substantial minority of the remainder (938).
• In the 1680s, when slavery still constituted a minority trade, total African exports were £6.5 million and imports were £1.7 million. This increased to £31.7 million in exports and £18.5 million in imports by 1780, the height of the slave trade. This then fell to £27.7 million in exports and £10.6 million in imports in 1820 as the slave trade was repressed, only to boom by 1860 to £51.8 million in exports and £41.3 million in imports as the commodities trade reemerged (939-940).
• Trade really increased significantly between Africa and Europe following the abolition of the slave trade in the mid and late 1800s, as African commodities were exported in massive quantities to European markets in exchange for European and American manufactured goods, especially textiles (941).
• Although the trade in commodities exceeding that of the slave trade in absolute terms, it is much smaller as a percentage of world trade. It is unlikely that Africa ever achieved the status in global trade that it held during the transatlantic slave trade (942).
• During its height, the British slave trade constituted perhaps 1/3 of total African trade, facing its weakest pre-colonial point between 1806 and 1815 as the British and American slave trades were both abolished (940).
• "Before the 1690s and after 1840, the value of slave exports did not exceed the value of commodity exports. In relative terms, the slave trade probably grew slowly from its inception in the fifteenth century before accelerating rapidly from the mid-seventeenth century on. By the 1680s, it amounted to half or just under half of all offshore trade" (944).
• After the abolition of the Anglo-American slave trade, slavery was restricted to imports to Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and Brazil. It still likely made up 2/3 of African transatlantic trade in the 1820s (945).
• The prices of slaves increased from the establishment of the trade until a peak during the 1780s, after which the prices declined following the closing of British and American markets. During this same time, the prices of European imports into African declined, especially after the late 18th Century (941).
• This means that over the course of the 18th Century, the slave trade became more and more in African economic favor as slaves became a more valuable commodity relative to European and American goods (942-944).
• Prior to the 18th Century, African exports consisted mainly of gold, although this trade had largely disappeared by the the late 1700s. When commodities reemerged in the 1850s, gold was no longer a major export (945).
• Although 'luxury' items such as ivory, teak, and beeswax did become more valuable in the 1800s, most West African exports were new industrial commodities such as senegal gum, peanuts, palm kernels, and palm oil. These three commodities dominated exports from the 19th Century, and by 1860 palm oil and peanuts made up 3/4 of all West African exports (946).
• African imports from Europe and the Americas were very diverse, consisting of a combination of manufactured and raw goods. The only imports in very large amounts were alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, with all other goods actually resembling the imports of North Americans from Europe (949).
• Although it was not originally prominent, by the late 1800s, British textiles had become a dominant African import, although not significantly more so than in other markets (949-950).
• Armaments increased significantly as imports from under 20,000 annually in the 1680s to 190,000 in the 1780s and 140,000 in the 1820s, and then skyrocketed to over 200,000 in the 1860s. This patterns of importation and likely linked to the stability of African states (950-951).
• Imports of guns per capita were likely higher in 1860 than during the height of the slave trade, indicating possibilities that other factors like state security played more into the arms trade than slavery did (954).
• Records show that gun ownership in Africa was concentrated geographically, between dominant groups with high rates of gun ownership and large populations with minimal gun ownership (954).
• There is little evidence to suggest that European imports had significant impacts on African technology, outside of new food crops from the Americas and European guns. Other technologies were already in Africa (957).
• The general conformity of patterns of African trade in the Atlantic world suggests that slavery did not have an out-sized impact on economic development in Africa, as no records of this have manifested themselves in trade patterns (957-958).