the Moluccas were then central to world trade as the only producers of the valuable spices cloves, mace, and nutmeg. Of these, nutmeg and mace grew only in the Banda Islands. Inhabitants of these islands produced and exported these rare spices in exchange for food and manufactured goods coming from the island of Java, from the entrepôt of Melaka on the Malaysian Peninsula, and from India, China, and Arabia.Read more at location 3794
The Cape of Good Hope was rounded by the Portuguese mariner Bartolomeu Dias in 1488,Read more at location 3799
Europeans now had their own independent route to the Spice Islands.Read more at location 3800
“The trade and commerce between the different nations for a thousand leagues on every hand must come to Melaka . . . Whoever is lord of Melaka has his hands at the throat of Venice.”Read more at location 3803
Portuguese systematically tried to gain a monopoly of the valuable spice trade. They failed.Read more at location 3805
City-states such as Aceh, Banten, Melaka, Makassar, Pegu, and Brunei expanded rapidly, producing and exporting spices along with other products such as hardwoods.Read more at location 3807
institutions was spurred by similar processes, including technological change in methods of warfareRead more at location 3811
the Dutch attempts to capture the entire spice trade and eliminate their competitors,Read more at location 3819
It was also the second company that had its own army and the power to wage war and colonize foreign lands. With the military power of the company now brought to bear, the Dutch proceeded to eliminate all potential interlopers to enforce their treaty with the ruler of Ambon. They captured a key fort held by the Portuguese in 1605 and forcibly removed all other traders.Read more at location 3822
Ambon was ruled in a manner similar to much of Europe and the Americas during that time.Read more at location 3826
The Dutch also took control of the Banda Islands, intending this time to monopolize mace and nutmeg. But the Banda Islands were organized very differently from Ambon. They were made up of many small autonomous city-states, and there was no hierarchical social or political structure. These small states, in reality no more than small towns, were run by village meetings of citizens. There was no central authority whom the Dutch could coerce into signing a monopolyRead more at location 3830
At first this meant that the Dutch had to compete with English, Portuguese, Indian, and Chinese merchants,Read more at location 3834
the Dutch governor of Batavia, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, came up with an alternative plan.Read more at location 3836
In 1621 he sailed to Banda with a fleet and proceeded to massacre almost the entire population of the islands, probably about fifteen thousand people. All their leaders were executed along with the rest, and only a few were left alive, enough to preserve the know-how necessary for mace and nutmeg production. After this genocide was complete, Coen then proceeded to create the political and economic structure necessary for his plan: a plantation society.Read more at location 3837
establishment of a set of economic and political institutions that would condemn the islands to underdevelopment.Read more at location 3844
Dutch had reduced the world supply of these spices by about 60 percentRead more at location 3845
The Dutch spread the strategy they perfected in the Moluccas to the entire region,Read more at location 3846
The long commercial expansion of several states in the area that had started in the fourteenth century went into reverse.Read more at location 3847
To avoid the threat of the Dutch East India Company, several states abandoned producing cropsRead more at location 3850
“Nutmeg and cloves can be grown here, just as in Malaku. They are not there now because the old Raja had all of them ruined before his death. He was afraid the Dutch Company would come to fight with them about it.”Read more at location 3853
the Burmese moved their capital from Pegu, on the coast, to Ava, far inland upRead more at location 3856
Dutch colonialism fundamentally changed their economic and political development.Read more at location 3860
The people in Southeast Asia stopped trading, turned inward, and became more absolutist.Read more at location 3860
they would be in no position to take advantage of the innovations that would spring up in the Industrial Revolution.Read more at location 3861
In Southeast Asia the spread of European naval and commercial power in the early modern period curtailed a promising period of economic expansion and institutional change.Read more at location 3869
a very different sort of trade was intensifying in Africa: the slave trade.Read more at location 3871
scholar Moses Finlay pointed out, slavery was anything but peculiar, it was present in almost every society.Read more at location 3873
Africa, however, as we saw in chapter 6, did not undergo the transition from slavery to serfdom as did medieval Europe.Read more at location 3875
large numbers of slaves were transported across the Sahara to the Arabian Peninsula.Read more at location 3877
medieval West African states of Mali, Ghana, and Songhai made heavy use of slavesRead more at location 3878
In the sixteenth century, probably about 300,000 slaves were traded in the Atlantic. They came mostly from Central Africa, with heavy involvement of Kongo and the Portuguese based farther south in Luanda, now the capital of Angola. During this time, the trans-Saharan slave trade was still larger, with probably about 550,000 Africans moving north as slaves. In the seventeenth century, the situation reversed. About 1,350,000 Africans were sold as slaves in the Atlantic trade, the majority now being shipped to the Americas.Read more at location 3881
The eighteenth century saw another dramatic increase, with about 6,000,000 slaves being shipped across the AtlanticRead more at location 3885
Adding the figures up over periods and parts of Africa, well over 10,000,000 Africans were shipped outRead more at location 3886
increase in warfare was fueled by huge imports of guns and ammunition, which the Europeans exchanged for slaves.Read more at location 3892
put in motion a particular path of institutional development in Africa.Read more at location 3899
Before the early modern era, African societies were less centralizedRead more at location 3899
Many, as we showed with Somalia, had no structure of hierarchical political authorityRead more at location 3901
First, many polities initially became more absolutist,Read more at location 3902
The law also became a tool of enslavement. No matter what crime you committed, the penalty was slavery.Read more at location 3904
Institutions, even religious ones, became perverted by the desire to capture and sell slaves.Read more at location 3909
One example is the famous oracle at Arochukwa, in eastern Nigeria. The oracle was widely believed to speak for a prominent deity in the region respected by the major local ethnic groups, the Ijaw, the Ibibio, and the Igbo. The oracle was approached to settle disputes and adjudicate on disagreements. Plaintiffs who traveled to Arochukwa to face the oracle had to descend from the town into a gorge of the Cross River, where the oracle was housed in a tall cave, the front of which was lined with human skulls. The priests of the oracle, in league with the Aro slavers and merchants, would dispense the decision of the oracle. Often this involved people being “swallowed” by the oracle, which actually meant that once they had passed through the cave, they were led away down the Cross River and to the waiting ships of the Europeans. This process in which all laws and customs were distorted and broken to capture slaves and more slaves had devastating effects on political centralization, though in some places it did lead to the rise of powerful states whose main raison d’être was raiding and slaving.Read more at location 3910
As Oyo expanded south toward the coast, it crushed the intervening polities and sold many of their inhabitants for slaves. In the period between 1690 and 1740, Oyo established its monopoly in the interior of what came to be known as the Slave Coast.Read more at location 3922
Asante expanded from the interior, in much the same way as Oyo had previously. During the first half of the eighteenth century, this expansion triggered the so-called Akan Wars, as Asante defeated one independent state after another. The last, Gyaman, was conquered in 1747. The preponderance of the 375,000 slaves exported from the Gold Coast between 1700 and 1750 were captives taken in these wars.Read more at location 3925
population of this region in 1850 ought to have been at least forty-six to fifty-three million. In fact, it was about one-half of this.Read more at location 3933
millions likely killed by continual internal warfare aimed at capturing slaves.Read more at location 3935
palm oil and kernels, peanuts, ivory, rubber, and gum arabic.Read more at location 3947
What were all these slaves to do now that they could not be sold to Europeans? The answer was simple: they could be profitably put to work, under coercion, in Africa, producing the new items of legitimate commerce.Read more at location 3950
the Asante political elite reorganized their economy. However, slaving and slavery did not end. Rather, slaves were settled on large plantations, initially around the capital city of Kumase, but later spread throughout the empire (corresponding to most of the interior of Ghana). They were employed in the production of gold and kola nuts for export, but also grew large quantities of food and were intensively used as porters, since Asante did not use wheeled transportation.Read more at location 3954
So the abolition of the slave trade, rather than making slavery in Africa wither away, simply led to a redeployment of the slaves, who were now used within Africa rather than in the Americas.Read more at location 3958
political institutions the slave trade had wrought in the previous two centuries were unalteredRead more at location 3960
Kidnapping was such a problem in some parts of Nigeria that parents would not let their children play outsideRead more at location 3965
slavery, rather than contracting, appears to have expandedRead more at location 3966
More accurate data exist from early French colonial records for the western Sudan, a large swath of western Africa, stretching from Senegal, via Mali and Burkina Faso, to Niger and Chad. In this region 30 percent of the population was enslaved in 1900.Read more at location 3968
advent of formal colonization after the Scramble for Africa failed to destroy slaveryRead more at location 3971
In Sierra Leone, for example, it was only in 1928 that slavery was finally abolished, even though the capital city of Freetown was originally established in the late eighteenth century as a haven for slaves repatriated from the Americas. It then became an important base for the British antislavery squadron and a new home for freed slaves rescued from slave ships captured by the British navy.Read more at location 3973
Liberia, just south of Sierra Leone, was likewise founded for freed American slaves in the 1840s. Yet there, too, slavery lingered into the twentieth century; as late as the 1960s, it was estimated that one-quarter of the labor force were coerced, living and working in conditions close to slavery.Read more at location 3976
industrialization did not spread to sub-Saharan Africa,Read more at location 3979
According to Lewis, many less-developed or underdeveloped economies have a dual structure and are divided into a modern sector and a traditional sector. The modern sector, which corresponds to the more developed part of the economy, is associated with urban life, modern industry, and the use of advanced technologies. The traditional sector is associated with rural life, agriculture, and “backward” institutions and technologies. Backward agricultural institutions include the communal ownership of land, which implies the absence of private property rights on land. Labor was used so inefficiently in the traditional sector, according to Lewis, that it could be reallocated to the modern sector without reducing the amount the rural sector could produce.Read more at location 3982
For generations of development economists building on Lewis’s insights,Read more at location 3987
South Africa was one of the clearest examples, split into a traditional sector that was backward and poor and a modern one that was vibrant and prosperous.Read more at location 3990
Across the river, it is as if it were a different time and a different country.Read more at location 3995
By now you will not be surprised that these differences are linked with major differences in economic institutions between the two sides of the river.Read more at location 3998
note that, historically, all of Africa was like the Transkei, poor with premodern economic institutions,Read more at location 4002
The backwardness of the Transkei is not just a historic remnantRead more at location 4005
The dual economy between the Transkei and Natal is in fact quite recent,Read more at location 4006
It was created by the South African white elites in order to produce a reservoir of cheap laborRead more at location 4006
there was something very attractive about the climate and the diseaseRead more at location 4016
European expansion into the interior began soon after the British took over Cape Town from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars.Read more at location 4019
a long series of Xhosa warsRead more at location 4020
The penetration into the South African interior was intensified in 1835, when the remaining Europeans of Dutch descent, who would become known as Afrikaners or Boers, started their famous mass migration known as the Great Trek away from the British control of the coast and the Cape Town area. The Afrikaners subsequently founded two independent states in the interior of Africa, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.Read more at location 4020
discovery of vast diamond reserves in Kimberly in 1867 and of rich gold mines in Johannesburg in 1886.Read more at location 4024
The resistance of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal led to the famous Boer Wars in 1880–1881 and 1899–1902.Read more at location 4025
After initial unexpected defeat, the British managed to merge the Afrikaner states with the Cape Province and Natal,Read more at location 4026
demand for food and other agricultural products and created new economic opportunities for native AfricansRead more at location 4029
Moravian missionary in the Transkei observed the new economic dynamism in these areasRead more at location 4031
He wrote, “To obtain these objects, they look . . . to get money by the labour of their hands, and purchase clothes, spades, ploughs, wagons and other useful articles.”Read more at location 4032
he was struck with the very great advancement made by the Fingoes in a few years . . . Wherever I went I found substantial huts and brick or stone tenements. In many cases, substantial brick houses had been erected . . . and fruit trees had been planted; wherever a stream of water could be made available it had been led out and the soil cultivated as far as it could be irrigated; the slopes of the hills and even the summits of the mountains were cultivated wherever a plough could be introduced. The extent of the land turned over surprised me; I have not seen such a large area of cultivated land for years.Read more at location 4035
“the growing desire of the part of natives to become proprietors of land—they have purchased 38,000 acres.”Read more at location 4043
the weakening of extractive institutions and absolutist control systems can lead to newfound economic dynamism.Read more at location 4047
self-made farmer from a poor background. In an address in 1911, Sonjica noted how when he first expressed to his father his desire to buy land, his father had responded: “Buy land? How can you want to buy land? Don’t you know that all land is God’s, and he gave it to the chiefs only?” Sonjica’s father’s reaction was understandable. But Sonjica was not deterred. He got a job in King William’s TownRead more at location 4048
a letter sent in 1869 by a Methodist missionary, W. J. Davis. WritingRead more at location 4055
he recorded with pleasure that he had collected forty-six pounds in cash “for the Lancashire Cotton Relief Fund.”Read more at location 4056
new economic dynamism, not surprisingly, did not please the traditional chiefs,Read more at location 4058
there was opposition to surveying the land so that it could be divided into private property.Read more at location 4059
“some of the chiefs . . . objected, but most of the people were pleased... the chiefs see that the granting of individual titles will destroy their influence among the headmen.”Read more at location 4060
Chiefs also resisted improvements made on the lands, such as the digging of irrigationRead more at location 4061
attempted to prohibit all “European ways,” which included new crops, tools such as plows,Read more at location 4064
The first was antagonism by European farmers who were competing with Africans.Read more at location 4074
The Europeans wanted a cheap labor force to employ in the burgeoning miningRead more at location 4076
Commission: Suppose the kaffirs [black Africans] retire back to their kraal [cattle pen]? Would you be in favor of asking the Government to enforce labour? Albu: Certainly . . . I would make it compulsory . . . Why should a nigger be allowed to do nothing? I think a kaffir should be compelled to work in order to earn his living. Commission: If a man can live without work, how can you force him to work? Albu: Tax him, then . . . Commission: Then you would not allow the kaffir to hold land in the country, but he must work for the white man to enrich him? Albu: He must do his part of the work of helping his neighbours.Read more at location 4080
Europeans had been confining Africans onto smaller and smaller reserves.Read more at location 4090
white minority having both the political and economic rights and the black majority being excluded from both.Read more at location 4092
the contrast between these Homelands and the prosperous modern white European economy seemed to be exactly what the dual economy theory was about.Read more at location 4107
they were just available as cheap labor,Read more at location 4117
traditional rulers, which had previously been in decline, was strengthened,Read more at location 4118
part of the project of creating a cheap labor force was to remove private propertyRead more at location 4119
Tribal tenure is a guarantee that the land will never properly be worked and will never really belong to the natives. Cheap labour must have a cheap breeding place, and so it is furnished to the Africans at their own expense.Read more at location 4121
No African was allowed to own property or start a business in the European partRead more at location 4131
As early as 1904 a system of job reservation for Europeans was introduced in the mining economy.Read more at location 4133
No African was allowed to be an amalgamator, an assayer, a banksman, a blacksmith, a boiler maker, a brass finisher, a brassmolder, a bricklayer . . . and the list went on and on, all the way to woodworking machinist. At a stroke, Africans were banned from occupying any skilled job in the mining sector. This was the first incarnation of the famous “colour bar,” one of the several racist inventions of South Africa’s regime.Read more at location 4134
The Bantu must be guided to serve his own community in all respects. There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour... For that reason it is to no avail to him to receive a training which has as its aim absorption in the European community while he cannot and will not be absorbed there.Read more at location 4141
South African whites had property rights, they invested in education,Read more at location 4154
Economic institutions were extractive; whites became rich by extracting from blacks.Read more at location 4156
At the time of the foundation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the Afrikaner polities of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal had explicit racial franchises, barring blacks completely from political participation. Natal and the Cape Colony allowed blacks to vote if they had sufficient property, which typically they did not. The status quo of Natal and the Cape Colony was kept in 1910, but by the 1930s, blacks had been explicitly disenfranchised everywhere in South Africa. The dual economy of South Africa did come to an end in 1994.Read more at location 4163
World inequality today exists because during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some nations were able to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution and the technologies and methods of organization that it brought while others were unable to do so.Read more at location 4172
European colonial empires was often built on the destruction of independent polities and indigenous economiesRead more at location 4179
following the almost total collapse of the native populations, Europeans imported African slavesRead more at location 4181
