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Relationship Between The Slave Trade And Africa

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Nunn, in his research to find if there is any relationship between the slave trade and Africa’s current underdevelopment, used data from different shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities, and he came up with estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country in Africa during Africa’s four slave trades. He found a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves taken from a country and its subsequent economic development. Which means, the slave trade can be considered as part of many African countries underdevelopment. Nunn pursued a number of strategies to better know if the relationship between the slave trade and current African underdevelopment is causal or spurious. If countries that …show more content…

Even those who might have participated on the slave trade on the sides of Europeans or on local slave trade could never contribute anything to the development of Africa, as Rodney indicated that ‘‘In Africa, the trading groups could make no contribution to technological improvement because their role and preoccupation took their minds and energies away from production.’’ On the other hand, the trade helped the Europeans to develop their economy with advancements in technology and agriculture using African labor and resources.

When Europeans came to Africa in the 15th century, Africa was by no means significantly weaker than Europe. The continent was maintaining its own development and that’s why Europeans started trade relations with the continent. But by the end of the 19th century, Africa was already weak and the Europeans were sure that the continent was already divided and feeble to defend itself when they held a conference in 1884 to scramble the continent.

European exploitation of Africa didn’t end after the abolition of slave trade in the second half of the 19th century, in fact, After Europeans colonized Africa, the exploitation changed its form and transformed in to a whole new scale of extraction of labor force and resources of Africa.

Rodney wrote that, “For the first three decades of colonialism, hardly

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