Atlantic Trading and the “Language of Goods”
Early Euro-African trade on the Upper Guinea Coast relied heavily on two of the major regional commodity currencies—bar iron and narrow strips of cotton cloth—that skilled artisans produced locally in standard units of linear measurement. Whether or not exchanged in their material forms, they served multiple functions as currencies of account and in reckoning market values and prices. In contrast to European currency systems, there was no government minting of coinage. But similar to coins, which historically have often been altered or melted down and turned into jewelry or luxury goods, these currencies had their own use values as well, which worked against debasement. Doubling as important basic commodities, bar iron and cotton strips could easily be taken out of circulation to be used for practical purposes if the need or desire arose. Each was also an intermediate good, that is, a semifinished material that skilled hands might turn into a well-known and valuable finished product. In the hands of blacksmiths, bar iron was fashioned into all sorts of useful tools, blade weapons, and productive agricultural implements. Cotton strips could be sewn by hand to become a wide wrapper called “country cloth” that a man or woman would wear draped around the body. Taken to skilled tailors, cotton strips were also made into sewn shirts and trousers worn by men. Iron and cotton thus moved into and out of currency flows, presenting another set of opportunities for their artisan producers.
European trading on the Guinea Coast has often been characterized simplistically as ad hoc “barter” for curiosities of little value, but what actually took place was much more complex than this stereotype allows. West African coastal trade was based on exchanges of two carefully calculated assortments, or bundles, of goods that were subject to differing valuations by the two parties. Each assortment consisted of a variety of goods that were negotiated and composed during the transaction. Assortments thus changed according to local negotiators and their circumstances. And over time, as supplies of and demands for specific commodities fluctuated, values of them in relation to one another changed as well. Furthermore, descriptions of particular commercial transactions illustrate that certain goods could serve as a measure of value for pricing and bargaining only, whereas corresponding quantities of other goods actually changed hands in payment. Parties who engaged in these transactions therefore had to make numerous and ongoing mental calculations, employing a special “language” of goods, specifying their names, their presumed unit values, and their equivalent valuations in relation to other goods. Each party could calculate by considering his or her own costs, values, and estimated profits and translating these into the language of goods shared with their counterparts. Though assortment bargaining on the Guinea Coast thus presented significant social, linguistic, and cultural challenges to parties on both sides, its flexibility offered a range of possible outcomes—deals could be sealed relatively smoothly and quickly, or difficult and protracted negotiations could be pursued with varying degrees of success, leading in some instances even to agreements to disagree.
Reliable commercial intelligence about the availability and origin of certain goods was key to successful trading on both sides, as were calculations of the current relative market values of goods. In some cases, parties would negotiate specific prices in good-for-good equivalences for major components of the bundles. But for the most part bargaining was primarily about the compositions of the assortments—which particular goods to include, their specific qualities, and how many of each. Instead of haggling over unit prices for each commodity, which would have been an overly cumbersome and time-consuming process, parties resolved variabilities of supply, quality, and demand by coming to agreement on the “mix” of the goods on hand at the moment. Crucial to the strategies of both parties was the inclusion of a wide range of goods—some cheap, others much more expensive. When they finally agreed on the two assortments—including, for example, undersized captives as well as strong adult males from the Africans, cheap beads as well as coral and long iron bars from the Europeans—and considered them as equivalent in value, the goods changed hands. And every completed assortment made a social statement about the buyer. An assortment selected by an African buyer represented his or her human geography and the cultural norms and preferences of specific consumers or customers he or she had in mind.27 A European’s assortment represented long supply chains and specific labor settings that determined the various destinations of their captives and other exports.
Some specialized West African merchants employed “arbitrage trading” to substantially increase their profit margins. “Arbitrage” is an economist’s term for taking advantage of differing prices for a given good in distant and distinct markets by moving the good from one to the other. In the case of Upper Guinea’s Atlantic trade specifically, new patterns of arbitrage trading developed between Europeans on the coast and suppliers and consumers in the interior. Detailed accounts of arbitrage demonstrate that a canny and intrepid trader who was armed with up-to-date commercial intelligence and willing to invest the necessary travel time could leverage his exchanges advantageously. Arbitrage was the practice of Juula long-distance merchants in the West African interior and also of some Luso-African traders on the coast in the early seventeenth century who linked the mainland to the offshore Cape Verde Islands and to Portugal (fig. 1.2). In this form of trade, rooted in the earlier, western African commercial system, a merchant would structure multiple trading routes in strategically selected segments going from one location to another and based on current pricing differences, which could be skillfully exploited to produce greater profit margins. A well-known account shows how merchants from the Cape Verde Islands leveraged a local salt resource through several steps into the final goal, which was a considerable sum of Spanish silver or its equivalent.
The trade we called “coastal” is mostly undertaken, in small ships . . . by Portuguese who live on Santiago Island [in the Cape Verde archipelago]. First they load these with salt, which they conveniently obtain for nothing on the islands of Maio and Sal in the Cape Verde Islands, and they sail to Serra-Lioa with the salt and trade it for gold, ivory, and kola. Then from Serra-Lioa they sail again to Joala and Porto d’Ale in Senegal, where they trade a portion of the kola for cotton cloths. They also sometimes trade ivory obtained in Serra-Lioa for Cape Verde cloths. From there they sail again east to Cacheo, where they trade the rest of their kola and their remaining goods for slaves. They acquire fifty to sixty slaves in exchange for the goods they have obtained by trade along the coast, and each slave is worth to them 150 reals, or pieces-of-eight. So they make 9,000–10,000 reals out of nothing, in a manner of speaking. For they are willing to put up with any discomfort, to an astonishing extent; and when they occasionally catch fish or come to a place like Serra-Lioa where everything is cheap, they eat like wolves.28
Arbitrage trading overland as practiced by the Juula Jahaanke of the upper Senegal River involved the intersection of a north–south axis of trade in gold and captives across the Sahara with an east–west trade in captives and overseas imports between the interior and the coast. A late seventeenth-century account of it featured exchanges for European goods on the coast, but Jahaanke merchants could just as easily have followed this same trading pattern before the Atlantic era by offering cotton textiles from inland in exchange for coastal sea salt. It began with Jahaanke merchants taking loads of locally woven cloth from Bundu on the upper Senegal River to the neighboring Bambuk goldfields, where they sold the cloth for gold. Traveling north to a desert-side entrepôt called “Tarra,” they were then in a strong position to negotiate with merchants specializing in the gold trade to North Africa. The Jahaanke, for their part, could profitably use their gold also to purchase whatever male captives there were on hand who remained unsold, for it was usually the case that Muslim slave markets in and across the Sahara preferred women and children. From Tarra, Jahaanke caravans forced their