precisely when and where major cotton production centers arose is very incompletely known, especially for the period before 1500. The earliest written information about cotton and cotton textile manufacture in sub-Saharan West Africa comes from al-Bakri’s eleventh-century compilation in which he states that the currencies of Sila (in the lower Senegal River valley) consisted of sorghum, salt, copper rings, and lengths of finely woven cotton. Weavers produced the cloth in a neighboring town where many households grew cotton on a small scale, apparently as a perennial. Al-Umari noted in the fourteenth century that one of the currencies in Kanem, in the vicinity of Lake Chad well to the east, was a locally woven cotton strip cloth, and that Mali, far to the west, was reportedly cultivating much cotton and producing high-quality cotton textiles.23 By the time of the Guinea trade, European explorers and merchants took note of places such as Senegambia on the Upper Guinea Coast and the Bight of Benin in the Gulf of Guinea where cotton textiles were available for export to other coastal markets. As Euro-African trade expanded, locally made cotton currencies remained necessary for purchasing provisions and paying for labor. They thus continued to be produced in competition with the higher-priced cotton imports from overseas.24
West African cotton currencies circulated as narrow strips or breadths of various widths—woven on local handlooms and calculated as standard units based on the number of lengths that would make a finished cloth or item of clothing. Al-Bakri’s report about the currencies in the lower Senegal River valley noted the cotton currency there circulated in lengths he referred to as izar, the Arabic word for mantle, the most basic and versatile of garments. Kanem’s cotton currency as described by al-Umari circulated in lengths of ten cubits (the forearm length from the middle finger tip to the elbow bottom), and purchases could be made using fractions from one cubit upwards. Imported cowries, beads, copper pieces, and silver coins also circulated there as currency, but their values were calculated in terms of the local cotton cloth units. Al-Umari also noted that the excellent white woven cotton of Mali was called kamisiya, from the Arabic qamis, a generic term for shirt.25
These cotton currency units, based on linear measures of cloth or sometimes in reference to a garment, continued to be standard into and throughout the era of Atlantic trade. Álvares de Almada described a former time on the Upper Guinea Coast, probably when he lived there in the mid-sixteenth century, when Luso-African merchants could safely lodge with local nobles and purchase slaves very cheaply. They paid for them in cows and cloths called sigas, which he described as a fixed length of the cotton currency called teada. Major cotton currencies along the Guinea Coast were known in many West African languages by the vernacular names for wrapper-size cloths.26
The passage of more goods and commodity currencies through the Sahara, the Sahel, and the savannas, rainforests, and coastal regions depended on the variations of seasonal working patterns, the frequencies and locations of trans-Saharan caravan arrivals, and the fluctuating intensities of local mining, processing, and workshop production. The West Africa that European merchants encountered was much more than the “Land of Gold” they dreamed of. Though not a fully integrated economic system or single market, it was a dynamic multicentric zone of trade and currency flows as well as other exchanges and transfers of all sorts. Trade languages reached widely across the landscape, and more people became polylingual. West African merchants and traders became increasingly flexible and adept at working with various methods of measuring and counting goods; farmers and artisans familiarized themselves with and mastered new skills, tools, and technological knowledge; and cultural values were subject to change as consumers acquired new tastes for alternative modes of dress and social behavior. The economies of West Africa together formed a large-scale intercommunicating zone supporting a long-standing history of trading ties to North Africa, the Mediterranean basin, and other distant lands.
Atlantic Trading and the “Language of Goods”
Early Euro-African trade on the Upper Guinea Coast relied heavily on two of the major regional commodity currencies—bar iron and narrow strips of cotton cloth—that skilled artisans produced locally in standard units of linear measurement. Whether or not exchanged in their material forms, they served multiple functions as currencies of account and in reckoning market values and prices. In contrast to European currency systems, there was no government minting of coinage. But similar to coins, which historically have often been altered or melted down and turned into jewelry or luxury goods, these currencies had their own use values as well, which worked against debasement. Doubling as important basic commodities, bar iron and cotton strips could easily be taken out of circulation to be used for practical purposes if the need or desire arose. Each was also an intermediate good, that is, a semifinished material that skilled hands might turn into a well-known and valuable finished product. In the hands of blacksmiths, bar iron was fashioned into all sorts of useful tools, blade weapons, and productive agricultural implements. Cotton strips could be sewn by hand to become a wide wrapper called “country cloth” that a man or woman would wear draped around the body. Taken to skilled tailors, cotton strips were also made into sewn shirts and trousers worn by men. Iron and cotton thus moved into and out of currency flows, presenting another set of opportunities for their artisan producers.
European trading on the Guinea Coast has often been characterized simplistically as ad hoc “barter” for curiosities of little value, but what actually took place was much more complex than this stereotype allows. West African coastal trade was based on exchanges of two carefully calculated assortments, or bundles, of goods that were subject to differing valuations by the two parties. Each assortment consisted of a variety of goods that were negotiated and composed during the transaction. Assortments thus changed according to local negotiators and their circumstances. And over time, as supplies of and demands for specific commodities fluctuated, values of them in relation to one another changed as well. Furthermore, descriptions of particular commercial transactions illustrate that certain goods could serve as a measure of value for pricing and bargaining only, whereas corresponding quantities of other goods actually changed hands in payment. Parties who engaged in these transactions therefore had to make numerous and ongoing mental calculations, employing a special “language” of goods, specifying their names, their presumed unit values, and their equivalent valuations in relation to other goods. Each party could calculate by considering his or her own costs, values, and estimated profits and translating these into the language of goods shared with their counterparts. Though assortment bargaining on the Guinea Coast thus presented significant social, linguistic, and cultural challenges to parties on both sides, its flexibility offered a range of possible outcomes—deals could be sealed relatively smoothly and quickly, or difficult and protracted negotiations could be pursued with varying degrees of success, leading in some instances even to agreements to disagree.
Reliable commercial intelligence about the availability and origin of certain goods was key to successful trading on both sides, as were calculations of the current relative market values of goods. In some cases, parties would negotiate specific prices in good-for-good equivalences for major components of the bundles. But for the most part bargaining was primarily about the compositions of the assortments—which particular goods to include, their specific qualities, and how many of each. Instead of haggling over unit prices for each commodity, which would have been an overly cumbersome and time-consuming process, parties resolved variabilities of supply, quality, and demand by coming to agreement on the “mix” of the goods on hand at the moment. Crucial to the strategies of both parties was the inclusion of a wide range of goods—some cheap, others much more expensive. When they finally agreed on the two assortments—including, for example, undersized captives as well as strong adult males from the Africans, cheap beads as well as coral and long iron bars from the Europeans—and considered them as equivalent in value, the goods changed hands. And every completed assortment made a social statement about the buyer. An assortment selected by an African buyer represented his or her human geography and the cultural norms and preferences of specific consumers or customers he or she had in mind.27 A European’s assortment represented long supply chains and specific labor settings that determined the various destinations of their captives and other exports.
Some
