Thread by @PeterGelderloos

Thread:
This excellent book looks at the impact of European slaving in Africa, the loss of the past for enslaved people, the predation of African states against stateless peoples, the limitations of independence in West Africa, and the fate of Pan-Africanism.

https://twitter.com/PeterGelderloos/status/1442789938425212932

West African states and aristocracies attained immense power and wealth through the slave trade, but all of this was wiped out by the way Africa was forcibly integrated into the "global" (colonial/neocolonial) economy,

with the most widespread African currency being stripped of its value then illegalized by European colonizers almost overnight.
In effect, European colonizers produced wealth through the slave trade that they used to fuel further wealth production, state-building, and war-making,

whereas in Africa the slave trade destroyed stateless peoples and produced client states that were led from one kind of dependence and competition to another, making Pan-African solidarity (including the diaspora) extremely difficult.

(Basically, societies in West Africa rarely offered up their own members to the European slave forts. Instead, merchant aristocrats and warriors/mercenaries used the advantage of European guns to kidnap eventually millions of people from other societies farther inland.)

(This interrupted the previous balance between roughly egalitarian, more and less hierarchical societies and led to mercantile/war-making states preying on stateless and refugee societies.)

Highlighting this book again since I missed last week's *TotW* and since it's so good.