Legitimate commerce

Legitimate commerce was the term used for African exports that replaced commodities associated with the slave trade, including palm oil and kernels, peanuts, ivory, rubber, and gum arabic. Its growth connected African economies to rising demand in Europe and North America, but it did not bring an end to slavery: in many places, enslaved people were instead put to work under coercion within Africa, producing the new export goods.

Meaning and Economic Context

The phrase described a change in what African societies exported, not a simple transition away from slavery. After Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and the United States followed the next year, external demand for enslaved people declined. Meanwhile, incomes rose in Europe and North America as the Industrial Revolution spread, increasing demand for tropical products. African societies, which had already responded actively to opportunities created by the slave trade, also took advantage of this new commerce.

The resulting trade was shaped by a stark contradiction: the market for exporting enslaved people had abruptly narrowed, but slavery remained deeply embedded in African societies. The people who could no longer be sold to Europeans were instead made to produce commodities for export at home. Legitimate commerce therefore changed the direction of coerced labor rather than removing it.

Reorganization of Labor in Asante and Dahomey

Asante, in what is now Ghana, provides a well-documented example. Before 1807, the Asante Empire captured and exported enslaved people, sending them to the coastal slave-trading castles of Cape Coast and Elmina. When that outlet closed, the political elite reorganized the economy without ending either slaving or slavery. Enslaved people were settled on plantations, first around the capital, Kumase, and later across much of the empire’s interior.

Their labor supported several kinds of production. Enslaved people mined gold and cultivated kola nuts for export, grew food, and worked as porters in a society that did not use wheeled transportation. The shift was not just from one export commodity to another: it also expanded the use of enslaved labor within the region, tying coerced work to production and transport alike.

A comparable arrangement existed farther east in Dahomey, where the king maintained large palm-oil plantations near the coastal ports of Whydah and Porto Novo. These plantations, too, relied on enslaved labor. The examples show how political authorities and elites adapted existing systems of enslavement to serve the new export economy.

Persistence and Expansion of Slavery

The trade’s abolition did not undo the political institutions and social patterns built around slavery in the preceding two centuries. In Nigeria, the Oyo Kingdom collapsed during the 1820s and 1830s amid civil wars and the rise of Yoruba city-states, including Illorin and Ibadan, which were directly involved in the slave trade to its south. After Oyo’s capital was sacked in the 1830s, Yoruba cities and Dahomey fought for regional dominance in a near-continuous series of wars during the first half of the century. Those conflicts generated a large supply of enslaved people.

Warfare was not the only source of enslavement. Kidnapping, condemnation by oracles, and smaller-scale raiding continued. In parts of Nigeria, the danger of children being kidnapped and sold was so serious that parents would not let them play outside. These practices demonstrate how slavery persisted through both organized conflict and local forms of capture after the overseas trade was curtailed.

Available estimates suggest that slavery expanded across Africa during the nineteenth century, though precise figures are difficult to establish. Accounts by travelers and merchants indicate that well over half the population in Asante, Dahomey, and the Yoruba city-states may have been enslaved. French colonial records offer a more specific estimate for the western Sudan: 30 percent of the population there was enslaved in 1900.

Historical Significance

The history of legitimate commerce complicates any account of abolition as a clean economic or institutional break. Britain’s ban reduced external demand for enslaved people, but it did not dissolve African states organized around slaving or remove slavery from African societies. In places such as Asante and Dahomey, export production continued by redirecting enslaved labor to plantations and other work within the region.

The term thus captures a change in the commodities entering international trade while exposing continuity in the institutions that produced them. Palm oil, gold, kola nuts, and other exports could be called legitimate in contrast to the slave trade, yet their production could remain bound to coercion and to political systems that had endured beyond the end of the Atlantic trade.