Currencies and Goods to Purchase Enslaved People

European and American slave ships headed to Africa, carrying a great variety of commodities from Europe, Asia, and the Americas that were used as currencies, including gold, sugarcane brandies, wines, tobacco, textiles, firearms, and gunpowder.

By the seventeenth century, Portuguese and French merchants purchased enslaved Africans from West African and West Central African traders by paying them with bundles containing various goods, conceived as a unit. In these regions, each set comprising specific products in predetermined sizes was referred to as a “piece” and later as a “head,” a clear reference to the enslaved person to be acquired with the bundle of merchandise.⁵⁹ In each port controlled by a given polity, there was also a particular protocol before initiating the trade, which included exchanging messages, providing gifts, and scheduling meetings.

Some observers from Europe saw Africa as having no currencies. Their accounts often described the commercial exchanges during the era of the Atlantic slave trade as barter, in which Europeans acquired enslaved Africans with baubles. For example, Samuel Robinson, a young British sailor whose correspondence was published in the nineteenth century, stated in a letter of April 1800, that “there is no money circulating in Africa, all business is transacted by way of exchanging one commodity for another.”⁶⁰ This idea is obviously inaccurate. As historian Toby Green has explained, even before the rise of the Atlantic exchanges, Africans had been using a variety of currencies in the trans-Saharan trade.⁶¹ Therefore, the trade between African and European agents consisted of complex and monetized operations. In other words, European traders never purchased enslaved Africans with random items. They procured African captives by paying local agents with commodities such as iron bars, cowrie shells, and various types of cloth in colors and patterns that were appreciated and widely employed as currencies in the ports of West Africa and West Central Africa, regions that also produced their own textiles used as currencies earlier before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade.⁶² Textiles in specific sizes transported in European ships were initially imported from China and India, but by the late eighteenth century, Portugal, France, the Dutch Republic, and Britain had developed their own imitations.⁶³ Either textiles or iron bars had also a use value.

Other forms of currency included lengths of copper (called “Guinea rods”) and manillas made of brass and copper-lead amalgam in various sizes, shapes, and weights.⁶⁵ Each region had its preferred currencies, which changed over time as the Atlantic slave trade developed.⁶⁶ Coral, amber, crystal, and especially glass beads were also used as currencies. Although there is no consensus about where these beads originated in Africa, a huge number of varying trade beads from West Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean were uncovered in two West African archaeological sites dated between the ninth and tenth centuries in Mali and southeastern Nigeria earlier, before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade.⁶⁷ Sixteenth-century written records also refer to the use of beads in commercial exchanges between Europeans and Africans. As they were greatly appreciated, Europeans also started manufacturing them in a variety of colors and designs. In Dahomey, oral tradition that still survives today refers to glass beads as symbols of wealth. They were believed to derive from the excrement of the snake (dan), a sacred animal (and deity) symbolizing the kingdom.⁶⁸

The tastes and specific preferences for particular commodities and luxury products by African rulers and their subjects shaped the Atlantic slave trade. Both in the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic systems, slave merchants from Europe and the Americas transported valuable goods that responded to the demands of African traders and inland communities. For African rulers, the display of refined imported objects was a powerful statement of their economic, political, and symbolic power. Take the example of the rulers of the Kingdom of Dahomey who during the eighteenth century developed a preference for a Brazilian third-rate tobacco cultivated in Bahia.⁶⁹ This predilection propelled Portuguese and Brazilian traders to settle in the ports of the Bight of Benin such as Ouidah, where they purchased enslaved Africans with Bahian tobacco.

On the Gold Coast, the intensification of the Atlantic slave trade in Cape Coast and Anomabu during the eighteenth century gave more power to Fante intermediaries who increasingly demanded that British slave merchants provide them with luxury items.⁷³ Likewise, in the ports of the Loango coast as well as in Luanda, these local agents accumulated more wealth. In some cases, their growing affluence threatened the political power of members of the local nobility, creating divisions in their home societies.⁷⁴ Similar offices also existed in Dahomey. In Ouidah, its main slave port, the king of Dahomey appointed middlemen holding the title of tegan and later that of yovogan, meaning “chief of the white men.”⁷⁵ These individuals were “governors” of sorts, who negotiated the terms of the slave trade with the Portuguese, the French, and the English, who, starting in the eighteenth century, established fortresses in Ouidah. Occasionally, these local agents could enter into conflict not only with the king of Dahomey but also with Brazilian merchants and European governors posted in these forts.⁷⁶

In the ports of Senegambia, such as GorĂ©e Island and Saint-Louis, slave traders also included the offspring of enslaved and free African women of various ethnicities with Portuguese, French, British, Irish, Alsatian, and American men, as well as other locally born African men and women.⁷⁷ In Accra, on the Gold Coast, locally born free African women married Danish traders stationed at the Fort Christiansborg.⁷⁸ Likewise, in Cape Coast, local women who engaged in unions with British men also became crucial agents in the Atlantic slave trade.⁷⁹ In Luanda and Benguela, the two Portuguese colonies and main slave ports of West Central Africa, many intermediaries who settled on the coast were Portuguese and Brazilian individuals and their descendants.⁸⁰ Itinerant traders who went inland to procure slaves in caravans composed of hundreds of individuals also included Africans and Luso-Africans.⁸¹ In these ports as in the various parts of Atlantic Africa where these unions occurred, African women became trade partners of their European spouses.