Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world, 1450–1850

Cross-cultural exchanges have historically taken many different forms, yet International Relations (IR) scholars have tended to focus narrowly upon a specific subset of cases associated with the history and theory of European imperialism and colonialism (e.g. Doyle 1986; Barkawi and Laffey 2002). The priority attached to European imperialism has meant that the history of cross-cultural exchange has been most commonly approached in terms of the forcible imposition of European preferences and agendas, with European actors taking advantage of their dominant ideological and material resources in order to manipulate and coerce their weaker counterparts in other parts of the globe (notwithstanding various manifestations of defensive negotiation and contestation). While some historical examples undoubtedly fit within this familiar template – especially from the mid-nineteenth tomid-twentieth centuries – there are also no shortage of historical examples where this default presumption of European dominance has proven misguided and misleading (Hobson 2004: 134-57; Darwin 2008: 93-97, 186-201). As other chapters in this volume can further attest, patterns of cross-cultural exchange between Europeans and peoples in other parts of the globe have been regularly defined by forms of negotiation, limitation and adaptation, rather than unilateral European imposition. In many settings Europeans found it difficult to consistently impose their preferences upon their counterparts elsewhere, and were obliged to develop alternative means of transferring items and ideas across cultural and political divides. These cross-cultural exchanges were not always equally beneficial to all of the parties involved, but they would not have taken place at all if those involved had not expected to benefit in the first place. This last point is crucial to understanding the history of European incursionsinto (what became) Atlantic Africa in the early modern era. During the roughly four centuries that preceded the ‘Scramble’ for Africa in the late nineteenth century, European traders and officials of many nationalities developed longstanding relationships with many of their coastal counterparts in Western Africa. As we shall see, a large portion of these links were based upon slave trading, especially from the mid-seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Cross-cultural slave trading was not only defined by tremendous levels of suffering anddeath – both in Africa and the Americas – but has also been widely identified as a key contributing factor when it comes to continuing problems facing many contemporary African states and their citizens. Under these circumstances, it is very tempting to explain African involvement in slave trading as a (by)product of European coercion and manipulation, yet this formula ultimately runs against the grain of a now significant body of research which suggests that the slave trade was often not so much imposed as negotiated. This chapter aims both to describe and explain some of the defining character-istics of patterns of early modern cross-cultural exchange between Europeans and Africans. In pursuit of this goal, we have divided the chapter into five sections. In the first section, we briefly reflect upon the relative neglect of pre-colonial Atlantic Africa within existing IR scholarship. The second section then goes on to consider other approaches to our chosen topic within the social sciences more broadly. Our main argument in these two sections is that many of the distinctive features of pre-colonial exchanges in Atlantic Africa have regularly been overlooked, either through a lack of interest or expertise, and/or as a consequence of a widespread tendency to define the last five centuries in terms of a lasting pattern of European domination and African dependency. In section three, we review some of the main cultural, political and economic attributes of Atlantic Africa in the early modern era. In addition to offering a brief introduction to the region, this section explores the link between slavery and larger social formations. In section four, we look at the early history of cross-cultural exchangesbetween Europeans and Atlantic Africans. We pay particular attention to the history of the Portuguese in Angola, which was the one areawhere amajor colonial footprint emerged before the nineteenth century. This history is important, because it offers insights into the capacity of Europeans to impose their preferences upon their African counterparts. One of the key themes to emerge here is the disjunction between the individual gains that accrued to both European and African slave traders and the larger collective costs of slave trading for peoples in Africa. Finally, we review a number of cross-cultural institutions and influences that characterized European dealings in Atlantic Africa more broadly. Transatlantic slavery would not have persisted for such a long period of time, or reached so many parts of the Atlantic coast, without a series of cross-cultural institutional arrangements that helped to standardize how trade took place, what units of exchange were used, and how contracts and credits were enforced. As we shall see, this regularly involved the repurposing of existing institutions and expectations to a variety of new ends, with Europeans commonly adhering to protocols and preferences established by their African counterparts

Ancient history · Atlantic World · Geography · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History

• Change in international order? An institutional analysis

  Open Access•Charlotta Friedner Parrat•European Journal of International…•2024

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