SE23 wrote:From my understanding, the continent was rife with slavery before colonialism. The Europeans simply utilized it more and made better profit.
Yes, chattel slavery was pervasive in subsaharan africa to begin with: Slaves were captured in raids, bought and sold and so on... But the whole slaving biz was more or less contained by the
demand for slaves in the regional slave markets, which can actually be quite limited. By and large, warlords don't spend resources raising warbands to capture slaves they figure out they won't sell. Typical African kingdoms might have a few million people and a few tens of thousands or hundred thousand slaves.
Cue the Islamic and European slave trades: Large nations with vast populations and vast riches from the massive plunder from their nascent empires (the colonization of the Americas, Islam spreading East as far out as Malaysia) need slaves, and they establish a truly global slave trade. Suddenly there
is a demand for tens of millions of slaves: The result is insanity, pure and simple. Entire economies in coastal Africa came to rely on industrial-scale slave raiding. This
destroyed entire African peoples, shattered tribes, emptied the land of productive people and further entrenched tribal hatreds. Slavers' devastation of Africa went on to do its nasty work for centuries, and when the industrial revolution resulted in the formal abolition of chattel slavery and its trade, when Africa might have started to recover, the Scramble for Africa began, fucking up the whole continent all over again.