19th Century: (Atlantic Africa’s Changing Patterns of International Trade — From Slave-Based Commerce to Legitimate Produce, the Beginning of Africa’s Modern…

19th Century: (Atlantic Africa’s Changing Patterns of International Trade — From Slave-Based Commerce to Legitimate Produce, the Beginning of Africa’s Modern Economic History, and the Prelude to the Scramble): One of the key themes in the history of Africa in the nineteenth century was the changing pattern of international trade. African experience of trade was by no means uniform — coastal West Africa was comparatively commercially developed with a long history of global trade, while swathes of eastern and central Africa were only beginning to experience long-distance commerce. International trade had a profound impact on African political, economic, and social development, and in terms of the commercial relationship between Africa and Europe, the early nineteenth century marks the beginning of Africa’s modern economic history. The very nature of this relationship — and of the patterns of trade themselves — led ultimately to the European partition of the continent in the final decades of the century: commercial and other economic interests were a powerful motive behind the scramble for Africa. Africa had been part of a global economy for centuries — the trans-Saharan trade had linked West Africa to the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean linked the Swahili coast with Asia, and most dramatically the transatlantic slave trade from the sixteenth century onward had tied coastal western and central Africa to Europe and the Americas. The nineteenth century, however, witnessed new developments and the incorporation of new regions into trade networks.