19th Century: (The Growing Powerlessness of Atlantic Africa in the Face of Global Commerce — African Exports Made an Ineffable Contribution to European Growt…

19th Century: (The Growing Powerlessness of Atlantic Africa in the Face of Global Commerce — African Exports Made an Ineffable Contribution to European Growth, Yet the Power to Change the System Lay Beyond the Continent, and Colonial Invasion Signified the Crystallization of Economic Imbalance into Political Domination): The experience of the Niger Delta states highlighted a key theme across Atlantic Africa and indeed the entire continent — growing powerlessness in the face of global commerce. Africans responded dynamically and creatively, if often violently, to the opportunities offered by overseas trade, and African exports — whether human labor or agricultural produce and raw materials — made an ineffable contribution to economic growth in Europe and the Americas. Yet Africans had less and less control over the system in which they increasingly invested during the nineteenth century. The power to change it lay beyond the continent, and most of the real benefits flowed that way too. It was a relationship between zones of the world characterized by a lack of both balance and equity, rooted in an economic mismatch between North and South that was becoming ever more marked by the late nineteenth century. From economic imbalance flowed political and cultural misunderstanding, and colonial invasion signified the crystallization of all of these. The core components of the relationship were present by the early nineteenth century and remained in place deep into the twentieth century and beyond.