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Ecology and Beyond 109
gation of Africa was the same as that of the Portuguese in the
fifteenth century ad.: direct access to India, to avoid the
power(s) controlling the Mediterranean route, namely Ptolemaic
Egypt for Eudoxus, the Italian cities and the Islamic powers
for the Portuguese. 40 But a long-distance voyage differs from
general connectivity. Large parts of the western coast of Africa
offer inhospitable conditions: deserts in tropical regions alternate
with dense forests with no easy access to the hinterland. As
early as the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had contacts on
the west coast of Africa to obtain gold, slaves, and ivory. 41 But it
was the achievement of the Spaniards to build a truly integrated
network. 42 The same conditions prevailed in modern times and
explain why the Portuguese, then the Dutch, could establish
trading posts in the Indian Ocean without significant contact
with Africa, apart from the region of the Cape of Good Hope. In
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, western Africa was
integrated for good into the general economy of the Atlantic,
but through the terrible interface of the slave trade, with its
devastating consequences for local peoples. The process of
acculturation of African societies began comparatively very
late, in the nineteenth century, and took the form of European
colonization, not of an autonomous and progressive transformation
of local societies through their contact with the outer
world. If there is no ecological unity on the western coast of
Africa, this is all the more true for the European and African
coasts taken together.
There is however an undisputable unity on the Atlantic coast
of Europe. Under the influence of the Gulf Stream, which
warms this part of the Atlantic, a mild climate prevails, quite
unlike the irregularities of the Mediterranean. The ancient
peoples facing the Atlantic in these regions were richly supplied
with all kinds of fish. The littoral also ‘provided a buffer of food
reserves’, making a general shortage unlikely under normal
political conditions, as has been convincingly shown by
B. Cunliffe. 43 But the predictable environment of the Atlantic
40
Casson, The Ancient Mariners, 168–9.
41
P. Butel, The Atlantic (London and New York, 1999), 39–44.
42
Ibid. 62–77.
43
B. Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples (Oxford,
2001), 555.