17th–18th Centuries: (The Ethiopian Slave Trade and the Firearm Economy — Amhara and Tigrayans Dispatching 10,000 Slaves a Year Through Massawa, Muslim Merch…

17th–18th Centuries: (The Ethiopian Slave Trade and the Firearm Economy — Amhara and Tigrayans Dispatching 10,000 Slaves a Year Through Massawa, Muslim Merchants as Intermediaries, Shankalla Captives from the Western Lowlands, and Firearms Strengthening Rather Than Destabilizing Highland Political Elites): The slave trade was arguably less widespread and less devastating in the Ethiopian region than in central-eastern Africa, although as the center of political gravity shifted north in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Amhara and Tigrayans were dispatching up to ten thousand slaves a year through Massawa on the coast. Highlanders sometimes moved merchandise in their own caravans, but increasingly the trade was in the hands of a distinct class of Muslim merchants, loath as highland Christians were to travel to the hot coastal lowlands. In the nineteenth century, some slaves were from the highlands, fetching high prices in Arabia, but increasingly captives were brought from the western Ethiopian lowlands and eastern Sudan, known derogatorily as shankalla. In addition to slaves, gold, ivory, skins, and spices were exported in exchange for firearms. Yet unlike in central-eastern Africa, firearms generally strengthened extant Amhara and Tigrayan political elites, largely through their ability to maintain commercial monopolies and control trade routes between coast and plateau — even so, as commerce fanned out, a range of groups were better able to challenge states than previously.