As they strove to sustain their supplies of foreign cloths, Venetian beads and fine porcelain, silk, sundry manufactured goods, and guns in increasingly high volumes, Africans living along the coast had also gradually come to understand that what the Europeans prized most was Black bodies. And for the most part, as long as these captives came from rival neighboring states, leaders of the balkanized societies along the coast felt little moral compunction about selling them.
