Entire Volume 17 issue 1 - Journal of World-Systems Research ...

EXTERNALITY AND INCORPORATION 186
among the Red Sea states revived as Cairo’s influence reappeared, and “[d]emand grew for
southern Ethiopia’s slaves, coffee, hides, skin, musk, and ivory, immediately affecting the north,
since trading centers in Shewa, Begemdir, and Tigray were involved in moving the commodities
to the sea” (Marcus 1994:54). European powers – notably the British and French – began to
show interest in the Horn of Africa and beyond, stimulated in part by the increase of trade goods
flowing from the Ethiopian interior. The slave trade proved to be of particular interest, and
Ethiopia was once again a periphery of contention between European and Muslim interests.
The slave trade provides a significant basis for understanding the trade linkages of
Ethiopia, and it also prompted Muslim and European interest in the region:
Middle Easterners long had bought Ethiopian slaves for their armies, their fields,
their homes, and their beds. The habasha slaves, 15
as they were generally
classified, were not usually from Abyssinia but from southern and western
Ethiopia, whose societies could not protect themselves against the raiders’
firearms. Religious law did not permit Christians to participate in the trade, but
they could buy, own, and use slaves; and rulers such as Sahle Sellassie could tax
transactions as the slaves were marketed or as the traffic passed through Shewa
and its dependencies (Marcus 1994:55).
While the claim that Christians could not “participate” in the slave trade – yet still buy, own, use
slaves and tax slave transactions – seems tenuous, the distinction refers to the active collecting
and marketing of the slaves. This distinction was taken seriously, as Muslims dominated the
slave trade and the slaves came from regions in the south or southwest, allegedly beyond the pale
of Christian authority. The slaves were transported across Ethiopia to the coast, where the slave
markets often operated in close proximity to markets for “legitimate” goods. A major slave
market at Abdul Resul saw 3000-4000 slaves sold annually for “export to Arabia, where a
growing economy created increasing demand for slaves” (Marcus 1994:55). Another reason
demand increased in the Red Sea region was because the contemporary expansion of Russia into
the Caucuses effectively cut off the flow of white slaves out of Central and Western Europe via
Istanbul and other Ottoman cities, thus the Muslim states looked elsewhere (Lewis 1990:72-73).
Britain unilaterally outlawed the trade in slaves in 1807, which provided a convenient
front on which Islamic economic power could be assailed. By 1828, the elimination of the slave
trade was being used as a criterion for relations with Ethiopia. Ras Sibargardis, the chief of Tigre
province in northern Ethiopia, sent his English servant to Bombay, Egypt and England in search
of firearms and military support. The chairman of the British Commission for Indian Affairs
considered the request favorably, feeling that “Ethiopia could become the emporium of East
African trade, and that the Ras if assisted could be expected to annihilate the slave trade”
(Pankhurst 1965:26). Thus, after lengthy negotiations a number – estimated around 3,000 – of
outdated matchlocks from the stores of the East India Company were forwarded to the Ras in
1831. This was the start of what would be the flow of hundreds of thousands of weapons over the
next hundred years, from a variety of sources in addition to Britain (Pankhurst 1965).
So, by the start of the nineteenth century Ethiopia was rapidly being drawn back into the
workings of the Red Sea network, which served as a proxy for the European world-system by the
15 “Habasha” translates as “Ethiopian”.