Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

150 DEBT
The Tiv, then, were well aware of what was happening all around
them. Consider, for example, the case of the copper bars whose use
they were so careful to restrict, so as to avoid their becoming an allpurpose
form of currency.
Now, copper bars had been used for money in this part of Africa
for centuries, and at least in some places, for ordinary commercial
transactions, as well. It was easy enough to do: one simply snapped
them apart into smaller pieces, or pulled some of them into thin wires,
twisted those around to little loops, and one had perfectly serviceable
small change for everyday market transactions.53 Most of the ones current
in Tivland since the late eighteenth century, on the other hand,
were mass-produced in factories in Birmingham and imported through
the port of Old Calabar at the mouth of the Cross River, by slavetraders
based in Liverpool and Bristol.54 In all the country adjoining
the Cross River-that is, in the region directly to the south of the
Tiv territory-copper bars were used as everyday currency. This was
presumably how they entered Tivland; they were either carried in by
pedlars from the Cross River or acquired by Tiv traders on expeditions
abroad. All this, however, makes the fact that the Tiv refused to use
copper bars as such a currency doubly significant.
During the q6os alone, perhaps a hundred thousand Africans were
shipped down the Cross River to Calabar and nearby ports, where they
were put in chains, placed on British, French, or other European ships,
and shipped across the Atlantic-part of perhaps a million and a half
exported from the Bight of Biafra during the whole period of the Atlantic
slave trade.55 Some of them had been captured in wars or raids,
or simply kidnapped. The majority, though, were carried off because
of debts.
Here, though, I must explain something about the organization of
the slave trade.
The Atlantic Slave Trade as a whole was a gigantic network of
credit arrangements. Ship-owners based in Liverpool or Bristol would
acquire goods on easy credit terms from local wholesalers, expecting to
make good by selling slaves (also on credit) to planters in the Antilles
and America, with commission agents in the city of London ultimately
financing the affair through the profits of the sugar and tobacco trade. 56
Ship-owners would then transport their wares to African ports like
Old Calabar. Calabar itself was the quintessential mercantile city-state,
dominated by rich African merchants who dressed in European clothes,
lived in European-style houses, and in some cases even sent their children
to England to be educated.