Trans-Saharan and Atlantic Trade

Trans-Saharan trade grew from complementary needs. The savannah states supplied leather, textiles, kola, natron and enslaved captives; North African markets supplied salt, horses, copper, manuscripts and finished goods. The routes also carried Islamic scholarship, legal practice and literacy in Arabic into cities such as Kano and Borno.

Atlantic trade began with Portuguese voyages to the coast in the late fifteenth century and later involved Dutch, British, French and other traders. Coastal and delta communities were positioned as intermediaries between inland suppliers and European ships that rarely moved far upriver.

In the north, Kano, Katsina and the Borno capitals functioned as terminal markets for caravans, with dyed cloth, leatherwork and grain among the goods traded. Scholarly and commercial networks extended across the Sahara for centuries, and the Hausa and Kanuri commercial diaspora carried trade well beyond the region.

On the coast, ports and trading states in what are now Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta, Cross River and Lagos grew into major points of exchange. Bonny, Brass, Calabar, Warri, Badagry and Lagos are among the places identified in the records of the period. Ijaw, Efik, Itsekiri and Yoruba traders operated as brokers, and canoe houses and merchant lineages became powerful in their own right.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, a large number of people were taken from this region into the trans-Atlantic trade, many of them captives of war, raiding or judicial enslavement. Estimates of the totals vary between scholars and are based on shipping records that are incomplete, so figures are best treated as ranges rather than settled numbers. The trade drew on suppliers far inland as well as coastal intermediaries.

Britain outlawed the slave trade for its own subjects in 1807 and afterwards stationed naval squadrons off the West African coast to intercept slaving vessels. Trade in palm oil, timber and other commodities expanded in the same decades, which is why nineteenth-century sources often refer to a shift toward what they called legitimate commerce. The overland trade across the Sahara continued into the same century before declining.

Trade reshaped the map. Towns that controlled routes or river mouths grew wealthy; some inland states gained from supplying markets, and others were weakened by the raiding and instability the trade encouraged. The wealth and armaments that came through the coast changed the balance between neighbouring communities.

The Atlantic trade also created the first sustained European commercial and later political presence on this coast. The trading relationships, treaties and consular arrangements built around palm oil and other commodities in the nineteenth century became one of the routes by which British authority expanded inland.

The descendants of people taken from this region form part of communities across the Americas and the Caribbean, and the period remains central to how the coastal and delta societies understand their own history.