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Africa and the globalization process: western Africa, 1450–1850

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  • Inikori, Joseph E.

Abstract

The article examines the debate on globalization as a historical process and provides a context for the assessment of western Africa’s long-run contribution to the process, the main subject of the article. It argues that the process began in the Atlantic basin in the sixteenth century; in the nineteenth, it gave rise to an integrated Atlantic economy, the nucleus of the modern global economy. The process involved the transformation of the predominantly subsistence economies of the Atlantic basin in 1450 to market-based economies before their integration by the Atlantic market could occur. Large-scale specialization of the plantation and mining economies of the Americas was central to the transformation process. Because of abundant land, large-scale plantation agriculture in the Americas was made possible by coerced African labour. In the end, the unique characteristics of the export slave trade that supplied coerced African labour to the Americas retarded the development of the market economy in western Africa and kept the region’s economies out of the integrated commodity production processes of the Atlantic economy until that trade ended in the mid-nineteenth century. The analysis of the commercializing process in the Atlantic basin and its causal link to England’s Industrial Revolution, with its new technologies, and to the establishment of the integrated nineteenth-century Atlantic economy presents a powerful argument that places Africa at the centre stage of the globalization process

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  • Inikori, Joseph E., 2007. "Africa and the globalization process: western Africa, 1450–1850," Journal of Global History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 2(1), pages 63-86, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:jglhis:v:2:y:2007:i:01:p:63-86_00
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    Cited by:

    1. Gareth Austin & Stephen Broadberry, 2014. "Introduction: The renaissance of African economic history," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 67(4), pages 893-906, November.
    2. Gabriele Cappelli & Jörg Baten, 2017. "European Trade, Colonialism and Human Capital Accumulation in Senegal, Gambia and Western Mali, 1770 - 1900," CESifo Working Paper Series 6468, CESifo.
    3. Roessler, Philip & Pengl, Yannick I. & Marty, Robert & Titlow, Kyle Sorlie & van de Walle, Nicolas, 2022. "The cash crop revolution, colonialism and economic reorganization in Africa," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 158(C).
    4. Klas Rönnbäck, 2014. "Living standards on the pre-colonial Gold Coast: a quantitative estimate of African laborers’ welfare ratios," European Review of Economic History, Oxford University Press, vol. 18(2), pages 185-202.
    5. Abdoumaliq Simone, 2016. "It's Just the City after All!," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(1), pages 210-218, January.
    6. Johan Fourie & Dieter Fintel, 2014. "Settler skills and colonial development: the Huguenot wine-makers in eighteenth-century Dutch South Africa," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 67(4), pages 932-963, November.
    7. Philip Roessler & Yannick I Pengi & Robert Marty & Kyle Sorlie Titlow & Nicolas Van de Walle, 2020. "The Cash Crop Revolution, Colonialism and Legacies of Spatial Inequality: Evidence from Africa," CSAE Working Paper Series 2020-12, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.

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