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Ivory & slaves in East Central Africa: Changing patterns of international trade to the later nineteenth century
pp. xviii 296
296 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1975
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July 23, 2020
This is a long review, but I've read this book twice now and I have a lot of thoughts.
Alpers did his PhD at SOAS in the 1960s, and this book is an extensively revised version of his doctoral research. The influences on Alpers’s work are evident throughout the text. He spent some time at the University of Dar es Salaam in the early 1970s, interacting with both the founders of the Dar es Salaam School and with Walter Rodney. The first goal of the book is to describe the economic history of East Africa’s involvement in international trade over five centuries, including the wider Indian Ocean world. The second is to uncover the root causes of what Alpers calls East Africa’s historical and present underdevelopment relative to the areas with which the region came into trading contact. He focuses on three groups found in East Central Africa, namely the Maravi, the Yao, and the Makua-Lomwe. Despite this focus, his principal source remains Portuguese documents housed in Lisbon and London, though he does incorporate ethnographic and oral material throughout.
The basic argument is that changing patterns of international trade in East Central Africa from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries need to be set within the context of underdevelopment. By way of explanation, he argues that far from producing “healthy” economic, social, and political development in the region, this historical process contributed to an increasingly divisive differentiation within and between the peoples of East Central Africa.
Alpers sets forth some of the methodological issues facing scholars of precolonial East Africa, though there is a conspicuous lack of comparative linguistic and archaeological material in the text, particularly given the existence of some relevant data at the time of writing. Regardless, Alpers notes that the first chapter on the economic, social, and political structures of the Maravi, Yao, and Makua-Lomwe peoples that opens the book was not in the original thesis, and we can view this addition as a positive one since it gives us a sort of anchor from which to view changes in these
societies over time. In this first chapter, Alpers uses ethnographic and oral material from the nineteenth century, but he asserts that some of these characteristics were probably operative in these societies back to the fifteenth century.
The Makua-Lomwe hunted elephants and were renowned spear handlers in warfare. The Yao were agriculturalists prior to the influence of coastal trading, but they also hunted and gathered. For the Yao, salt was intimately connected to ritual beliefs and social unity in their matrilineages. When Yao men were away procuring trade goods, women continued agricultural labour, and by the nineteenth century Yao men were essentially roving caravanners. The Maravi, who were the ancestors of a number of present ethnic groups in Malawi, including the Mang’anja and the Chewa, are suggested by Alpers to have been closer in cooperating across gender lines because of the productiveness of their land. Maravi men appear to have been more involved in agriculture than were their Yao and Makua-Lomwe counterparts. There was lots of salt and iron endemic to the region, and lots of elephants for ivory. Later, the dense population seems to have made it a region popular for slave raiding.
According to Alpers, differences and unequal distribution of items like salt and iron nurtured what he calls a healthy exchange of goods between these peoples prior to the effects of Indian Ocean trade. This potentially romanticized situation is contrasted to later stages of economic history in the region. He calls this early period a transitional stage of development, with each society moving slowly from communalism to some other stage of development. The Maravi seem to have had the richest and most varied economy, as well as the most developed state system. Makua-Lomwe hunting, gathering, and trading with their neighbours, Alpers argues, set the stage for their ability to meet the demands of international trade. Meanwhile, the Yao, because they had no salt access in their home region, did extensive traveling and could seize opportunities for trading in luxury items in later centuries as the international market economy penetrated East Central Africa.
Alpers argues that Yao and Makua-Lomwe women were the most productive members of the agricultural economy; their labour constituted the base upon which society was constructed. This allowed men to hunt elephants and to trade. Here Alpers states that while women were taking the major responsibility for producing the real wealth in their societies—wealth upon which genuine development could be based—men were beginning to engage in a related set of purely extractive economic activities. For the Yao, Alpers argues, participation in extractive activities like the ivory trade became so important that the society came to be derived from the wealth and prestige that it brought, rather than from the truly productive aspects of the economy, such as agriculture and
manufacturing. He argues that this process became more pronounced with the rise of the slave trade in East Central Africa, bringing strife to victims and only superficial strength to those who preyed upon them.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Yao economic values were, for Alpers, completely distorted so that trading was the only activity considered worth pursuing. Alpers claims that none of the trading goods of the international market contributed to African methods of production. He further traces the impact of two centuries of Portuguese activity in the region, as well as the seventeenth-century incursions of Omanis and French. This included impact both on the coast, at places like Kilwa, and into the interior within the Maravi Empire. Moreover the Yao began to emerge as trading powers and the lucrative trade to Kilwa was initialized. In these centuries ivory became extremely valuable. Two major routes now led from the coast to the interior and back. Alpers argues that in the centuries that were to follow, as ivory lessened in importance and slavery rose, the people of the interior of East Central Africa became closely linked and subordinated to international merchant capitalism, much to their underdevelopment.
Alpers did his PhD at SOAS in the 1960s, and this book is an extensively revised version of his doctoral research. The influences on Alpers’s work are evident throughout the text. He spent some time at the University of Dar es Salaam in the early 1970s, interacting with both the founders of the Dar es Salaam School and with Walter Rodney. The first goal of the book is to describe the economic history of East Africa’s involvement in international trade over five centuries, including the wider Indian Ocean world. The second is to uncover the root causes of what Alpers calls East Africa’s historical and present underdevelopment relative to the areas with which the region came into trading contact. He focuses on three groups found in East Central Africa, namely the Maravi, the Yao, and the Makua-Lomwe. Despite this focus, his principal source remains Portuguese documents housed in Lisbon and London, though he does incorporate ethnographic and oral material throughout.
The basic argument is that changing patterns of international trade in East Central Africa from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries need to be set within the context of underdevelopment. By way of explanation, he argues that far from producing “healthy” economic, social, and political development in the region, this historical process contributed to an increasingly divisive differentiation within and between the peoples of East Central Africa.
Alpers sets forth some of the methodological issues facing scholars of precolonial East Africa, though there is a conspicuous lack of comparative linguistic and archaeological material in the text, particularly given the existence of some relevant data at the time of writing. Regardless, Alpers notes that the first chapter on the economic, social, and political structures of the Maravi, Yao, and Makua-Lomwe peoples that opens the book was not in the original thesis, and we can view this addition as a positive one since it gives us a sort of anchor from which to view changes in these
societies over time. In this first chapter, Alpers uses ethnographic and oral material from the nineteenth century, but he asserts that some of these characteristics were probably operative in these societies back to the fifteenth century.
The Makua-Lomwe hunted elephants and were renowned spear handlers in warfare. The Yao were agriculturalists prior to the influence of coastal trading, but they also hunted and gathered. For the Yao, salt was intimately connected to ritual beliefs and social unity in their matrilineages. When Yao men were away procuring trade goods, women continued agricultural labour, and by the nineteenth century Yao men were essentially roving caravanners. The Maravi, who were the ancestors of a number of present ethnic groups in Malawi, including the Mang’anja and the Chewa, are suggested by Alpers to have been closer in cooperating across gender lines because of the productiveness of their land. Maravi men appear to have been more involved in agriculture than were their Yao and Makua-Lomwe counterparts. There was lots of salt and iron endemic to the region, and lots of elephants for ivory. Later, the dense population seems to have made it a region popular for slave raiding.
According to Alpers, differences and unequal distribution of items like salt and iron nurtured what he calls a healthy exchange of goods between these peoples prior to the effects of Indian Ocean trade. This potentially romanticized situation is contrasted to later stages of economic history in the region. He calls this early period a transitional stage of development, with each society moving slowly from communalism to some other stage of development. The Maravi seem to have had the richest and most varied economy, as well as the most developed state system. Makua-Lomwe hunting, gathering, and trading with their neighbours, Alpers argues, set the stage for their ability to meet the demands of international trade. Meanwhile, the Yao, because they had no salt access in their home region, did extensive traveling and could seize opportunities for trading in luxury items in later centuries as the international market economy penetrated East Central Africa.
Alpers argues that Yao and Makua-Lomwe women were the most productive members of the agricultural economy; their labour constituted the base upon which society was constructed. This allowed men to hunt elephants and to trade. Here Alpers states that while women were taking the major responsibility for producing the real wealth in their societies—wealth upon which genuine development could be based—men were beginning to engage in a related set of purely extractive economic activities. For the Yao, Alpers argues, participation in extractive activities like the ivory trade became so important that the society came to be derived from the wealth and prestige that it brought, rather than from the truly productive aspects of the economy, such as agriculture and
manufacturing. He argues that this process became more pronounced with the rise of the slave trade in East Central Africa, bringing strife to victims and only superficial strength to those who preyed upon them.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Yao economic values were, for Alpers, completely distorted so that trading was the only activity considered worth pursuing. Alpers claims that none of the trading goods of the international market contributed to African methods of production. He further traces the impact of two centuries of Portuguese activity in the region, as well as the seventeenth-century incursions of Omanis and French. This included impact both on the coast, at places like Kilwa, and into the interior within the Maravi Empire. Moreover the Yao began to emerge as trading powers and the lucrative trade to Kilwa was initialized. In these centuries ivory became extremely valuable. Two major routes now led from the coast to the interior and back. Alpers argues that in the centuries that were to follow, as ivory lessened in importance and slavery rose, the people of the interior of East Central Africa became closely linked and subordinated to international merchant capitalism, much to their underdevelopment.
Displaying 1 of 1 review