Where commercial relations with foreign parts are maintained, it is otherwise. A slave-owner who receives large quantities of agricultural produce from his slaves can now exchange them for foreign merchandise. Retaining for himself as much food as he wants, he exchanges the rest for such objects as are either useful and agreeable in themselves, or give him distinction among his countrymen. The use of slave labour becomes thus practically unlimited. Kohler rightly remarks that only where the economic instinct is awake, can slavery attain to a full development, and Schmoller observes that, when the patriarchal family began to produce for the market, covetousness and pursuit of gain arose and the treatment of slaves became worse[275].
We must further take into consideration that slavery on a very large scale is only possible, where industrial crops are raised. “Tobacco and cotton” says Cairnes, “fulfil that condition which we saw was essential to the economical employment of slaves—the possibility of working large numbers within a limited space; while wheat and Indian corn, in the cultivation of which the labourers are dispersed over a wide surface, fail in this respect”[276]. And cotton and similar crops are only cultivated in large quantity where they are exported. [[396]]
Of such “wholesale slavery”, as Bagehot terms it, we find a few instances among savage tribes.
Köler tells us that in Bonny the great majority of the inhabitants are slaves. The keeping of slaves is very expensive, as agriculture and industry scarcely exist; all food has to be imported. The freemen are traders in palm-oil, and want large numbers of slaves to row the canoes in which this oil is transported[277].
Among the Ewe of the Slave Coast slavery is practised on a very large scale. Some men keep 200–300 slaves, who form their capital. The slaves are generally employed in carrying oil from the inland to the coast for sale to Europeans. The maintaining of order among such great numbers of slaves requires great severity. Slavery marks all their institutions. It is a common saying with them that “the large water-tub does not go to the spring”, whereby they mean that freemen must not do such work as is only fit for slaves and boys[278].
Miss Kingsley, speaking of the social classes among the tribes, inhabiting the territory of the Oil Rivers on the Western Coast of Africa, says: “The third and fourth classes are true slave classes, the higher one in rank being what is called the Winnaboes or Trade boys, the lower the pull-away boys and the plantation hands. The best point in it, as a system, is that it gives to the poorest boy who paddles an oil canoe a chance of becoming a king”[279].
Among the Garos, where cotton is the principal culture, two-fifths of the population are slaves. “The distinction [between freemen and slaves] is jealously preserved.… It is from the possession of a large number of them [slaves] that a man obtains influence amongst his tribe”[280].
It is clear that among these tribes slavery would not prevail to such a great extent, if the preparing and transporting of the articles of export did not require so much labour.
In these cases trade is the cause of “wholesale slavery”, not necessarily of slavery in general. “Retail slavery” may have [[397]]existed among these tribes before they became so largely commercial. But, seeing that among them the extension of commercial relations has so greatly increased the use of slave labour, we may safely suppose that in several cases the development of trade has given rise to slavery among tribes which did not practise it before. This is also made probable by the list given at the beginning of this paragraph.
We shall not proceed to a closer investigation of this subject. We have already remarked that as yet we know very little about the general effects of trade and the place it occupies in social life among savages. And we must know more of this, before we can arrive at any accurate conclusion with regard to the influence of trade on the rise and growth of slavery.