23 - Power, Rank and Privilege

Summary

LOCAL OR SHORT-DISTANCE TRADE, SPURRING THE DIVERSIFICATION of goods produced by specialists, helped to give society its early division of labour. Long-distance trade deepened this effect. Both increased the power of chiefs and the authority of kings. This can be shown for every major region, though by no means for every people.

Central Africa experienced the same general sequence as the Western Sudan. Down the long East Coast the Swahili city-states, by the thirteenth century strongly Muslim in their tone and accent, could handle gold and ivory from the inland peoples, and send back to them Indian cottons and other useful manufactures. Responding, the inland peoples expanded their own production, hunting the elephant far and wide, opening thousands of gold-bearing deposits. By 1450 the greater part of the central plateau—an area about the size of Western Europe—was enclosed within a series of producer-states whose interests were marginally but perhaps crucially influenced by the long-distance trade.

Any such trade required a certain degree of central direction. It also called for defence of caravan trails. Ritual leaders went into trade, but they also went into warfare; and kings emerged. The process had its own momentum. If a chief could expect a tusk of every elephant killed in his people's territory as part of his ‘emoluments’— the example is from Malawi—then he had an interest both in extending his trade and enlarging his kingdom. Many saw the point and pressed it home.

The forms varied far more than the content, at least outside the Muslim sphere. No matter how energetically they drove the trade of their kingdoms, the kings were not capitalists. They might accumulate, but were invariably expected to disgorge their wealth in regular gifts to deserving persons: that is, to kinship-segments over whom they ruled. Good kings did this wisely or sufficiently well; bad kings paid for their greed by hostile plots and deposition. Even in a kingdom as centrally organised as eighteenth-century Dahomey, where the king controlled a state economic sector of considerable importance as well as monopolising all trade with Europeans on the coast, it remained mandatory on the monarch to share out his proceeds at ‘annual customs’, where generous handouts could maintain the general balance of the state.