Many people want to believe that slavery was imposed on West Africa by European colonialism, but historians describe a situation that is more complex and compatible with what we know of Liverpool’s involvement. When Equiano writes of his childhood in Benin, ‘My father, besides many slaves, had a numerous family,’ the casual reference to enslavement is as revealing as the plurality of ‘many’. Slavery was widespread in West Africa before European traders arrived, partly because traditional restrictions on land ownership meant that acquiring slaves was an obvious way to accumulate capital and prestige. Some slaves were integrated into households or put to work in conditions no worse than those of serfs in Europe. They could acquire property and free themselves. Others were sent down mines, or into battle, and had no more control over their lives than the chattel slaves bought by the English and worked to death on West Indian plantations.
In the early years of contact, as Ana Lucia Araujo notes in her informative, Iberian-angled book, the Portuguese sought a foothold on the West African coast while seizing slaves, but then access to the trade rather than possession of territory became the priority. By the 18th century, Europeans were bartering in a market in which Africans sold other Africans along with copper bracelets and spices. Slaves had for centuries been marched across the Sahara into the Islamic world, and when Liverpool traders set themselves up in Bonny and Calabar on the Niger delta they were able to draw on a network of Aro traders who brought captives down to the coast. Those who follow Williams in regarding the slave trade as the engine of capitalist modernity remind us that it depended on credit, between manufacturers in Lancashire who provided textiles and metal goods for trading and the slavers who took these to Africa, and then between the slavers and those who bought people from them in the Caribbean and North America. This does explain the centrality of banking and insurance to the slaving enterprises of Liverpool (and Bristol and London), but the trade was equally based on credit in Africa between European slavers and local merchants. In the polyglot, intermarrying, mixed towns along the coast, trust was built through hospitality and neighbourliness.