Atlantic trade and the West African market economy: New evidence from cowry imports, 1650–1905

Abstract

Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, billions of cowries arrived in West Africa, leaving one of the few quantitative traces available for historians to measure the Atlantic trade's impact on the precolonial market economy. Yet, current estimates substantially underestimate the volume of cowry imports. Drawing on unexplored and underutilized sources, most notably French records, this article presents a new annual time series of cowry imports into West Africa between 1650 and 1905. This series reframes three long‐standing debates. First, contrary to arguments that the slave trade's negative economic impacts were already evident in its early phases, cowry imports grew as the slave trade progressed. Second, by reconstructing the nominal cowry stock, the article shows that the end of the slave trade in a context without a clear alternative caused a lasting contraction of the market economy. Third, the interplay between cowry and coin imports challenges the influential ‘great inflation’ thesis by showing that the region absorbed much larger currency inflows than previously assumed. Together, these findings reveal a highly responsive but exposed monetary system that alternated between rapid growth and deep depressions, a pattern that shaped the Atlantic trade's long‐run economic impact in West Africa.