The Trans-Saharan Trade: Effects and Decline – Forms of Slave Trade (Senior 6 History) | Ganzaa

Forms of Slave Trade

Lessons

Senior 6 · History

Forms of Slave Trade

5 lessons

Lesson 2 of 5

The Trans-Saharan Trade: Effects and Decline

25 min

Start with a cycle

In the central Sahel, around Lake Chad, the trade in people fed on itself. Read the diagram clockwise from the top.

A war horse bred north of the desert could cost several captives, yet it gave a Sahelian ruler the cavalry he needed to raid. The raids produced captives; the captives paid for more horses. Historians such as Robin Law have traced this exchange of horses for captives across West Africa. It worked as a self-reinforcing cycle: each round made the ruling group stronger and its victims weaker, and made the next round more likely. Keep this cycle in mind: many of the trade's effects grow out of it.

Definition

Effect (consequence): a change produced by an event or process. Examiners expect effects to be sorted, for example into political, economic, social and demographic, and to be weighed, not only listed.

Demographic: to do with the size, age and sex balance of a population. The loss of many young women from a region is a demographic effect.

Diaspora: a community of people living far from their ancestral homeland, and their descendants.

Effects of the trans-Saharan trade

In sub-Saharan Africa (the supplying regions)	In North Africa and the Middle East (the buying regions)
Political. Militarised states such as Kanem-Bornu, Wadai and Bagirmi grew rich and powerful from raiding and taxing the trade; weaker, stateless peoples were raided again and again.	Political. Rulers built palace households and armies of enslaved men, such as the Black army of Moulay Ismail of Morocco.
Economic. Trading towns (Kano, Timbuktu, Kukawa) and their merchants prospered; horses, cloth, copper and salt flowed south. Slavery also grew inside Sahelian societies, where captives worked farms for their owners.	Economic. Merchants of Ghadames, Tripoli, Fez and Cairo grew wealthy; households gained cheap labour.
Social and demographic. Raided regions lost people, above all young women and children; villages moved to hilltops or built walls for safety; fear and insecurity shaped daily life.	Social. African diaspora communities formed; the Gnawa musical tradition of Morocco grew from them.
Cultural and religious. Islam, Arabic literacy and Islamic law spread along the trade routes, carried by merchants and scholars.	Cultural. Over the centuries, dark skin became associated with slave status, a prejudice studied by historians such as Chouki El Hamel.

The human cost of the journey was severe. Nineteenth-century European travellers such as Gustav Nachtigal reported that many captives died of thirst, exhaustion and cold before they ever reached a northern market.

Warning

Do not credit the slave trade with the spread of Islam. Islam spread in West Africa mainly through merchants, scholars and rulers who chose to convert, alongside the gold trade. The slave trade ran along the same routes, but it also pushed raiders to seek non-Muslim victims. Write "Islam spread along the trade routes", not "the slave trade spread Islam".

Why the trade declined, and why so late

The timeline shows a surprise. The trans-Saharan trade in people did not fade when the Atlantic trade rose; the historian Paul Lovejoy estimates the number sent across the desert in the nineteenth century alone at about 1.2 million. Its end came in stages, for several reasons working together.

War and the shift of trade. The Moroccan invasion of Songhai in 1591 broke the greatest Sahelian state, and from the sixteenth century much West African trade turned towards European ships on the Atlantic coast.
Abolition by African and Ottoman rulers. Ahmad Bey of Tunis banned the export, import and sale of slaves in 1842 and abolished slavery itself in 1846, two years before France and nineteen years before the United States. An Ottoman decree of 1857 banned the African slave trade, though in Tripoli it was largely ignored.
European pressure. Britain, having abolished its own trade, used diplomacy and naval power against the trade in the Mediterranean; the Brussels Conference Act of 1890 committed the European powers to suppress slave raiding.
Colonial conquest. French conquest of the western and central Sahel, British conquest of northern Nigeria, and the Italian conquest of Libya (from 1911) broke the power of the raiding states and closed the markets. The French decree of 12 December 1905 banned the slave trade across French West Africa.
New transport. By the 1910s railways linked Kano to the Atlantic port of Lagos, and goods that had crossed the desert for a thousand years began to travel south to the sea instead.

The caravan route from Murzuk to Tripoli, from the map of the French officer Parfait-Louis Monteil's journey from Saint-Louis in Senegal to Tripoli by way of Lake Chad (published 1895). In the 1890s this was still a working route of the trade from Bornu. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Tip

Group the factors, then rank them. For a "why did it decline" essay, sort the factors into internal (African and Ottoman decisions, wars in the Sahel) and external (European pressure, colonial conquest, railways). Then say which mattered most. Many historians give colonial conquest the decisive role, because laws such as the 1857 decree changed little until the raiding states and markets were physically overthrown.

Important

Discuss. Tunisia abolished slavery in 1846, before France or the United States. Why is this fact often left out of the story of abolition? What difference does it make to how we understand who ended slavery?

✦

Practice

Using the diagram, explain the horse-for-captives cycle in your own words.
Give one political, one economic and one social effect of the trans-Saharan trade on the supplying regions.
Explain why "the slave trade spread Islam" is an inaccurate statement.
How many years passed between Tunisia's abolition of slavery and Mauritania's? Show the calculation.
Explain why the Ottoman decree of 1857 did not end the trade through Tripoli.
"Colonial conquest, not humanitarian abolition, ended the trans-Saharan slave trade." Assess this view.

Show answersHide answers

North African merchants sold horses and weapons to Sahelian rulers; the rulers used them to build cavalry; cavalry raided weaker neighbours for captives; the captives were sold north to pay for more horses. Each turn strengthened the raiders and weakened their victims, so the cycle kept itself going.
Political: militarised states such as Kanem-Bornu grew powerful while stateless peoples were raided. Economic: trading towns such as Kano and Kukawa prospered, and slavery grew inside Sahelian societies. Social: raided regions lost young women and children, and villages moved to hilltops or built walls.
Islam spread mainly through merchants, scholars and rulers who converted, often alongside the gold trade. The slave trade used the same routes but actually pushed raiders to target non-Muslims, since free-born Muslims could not lawfully be enslaved. So Islam spread along the trade routes, not because of the slave trade.
1981 − 1846 = 135 years.
It was issued far away in Istanbul, under British pressure, and local officials, merchants and raiding states in the Fezzan and Bornu had no interest in enforcing it. The trade stayed profitable, and there was no power on the ground able to stop it until colonial conquest.
For: the dates show that laws alone (1857) changed little; the markets closed when colonial armies conquered the Sahel and Libya (1905 decree after the French conquest; Kufra in 1931); railways then redirected trade. Against: abolition by Tunisia in 1842 and 1846 and British anti-slavery pressure came first and made the trade illegal; the Brussels Act of 1890 gave conquest its anti-slavery justification. Judgement: conquest was the decisive practical cause, but it was made possible and justified by the earlier abolitionist movement, which also served European imperial interests.

Sources and credits

Dates of abolition in Tunisia, Algeria and Tripoli, Kufra and Mauritania: Trans-Saharan slave trade, Wikipedia contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0. Facts checked and rewritten by Ganzaa.
The nineteenth-century estimate of about 1.2 million: Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, third edition (Cambridge University Press), table of the estimated volume of the Saharan slave trade, 650 to 1900.
The decree of 12 December 1905: order promulgating the decree on the repression of the slave trade in French West Africa and the French Congo, document published by the CNRS project on slavery (esclavages.cnrs.fr).
Map: Tripoli to Murzuk route map detail, from P.-L. Monteil, De Saint-Louis à Tripoli par le lac Tchad (1895), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the cycle diagram, the timeline, the table, the definitions and the exercises. This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.

1Start with a cycle

2Effects of the trans-Saharan trade

3Why the trade declined, and why so late

Start with a cycle

Effects of the trans-Saharan trade

Why the trade declined, and why so late