Nineteenth-century ‘trade guns’ in the Congo Estuary: Local refractions of a global trade

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, African communities in the Congo estuary displayed a consistent preference for ‘trade guns’, the rough-and-ready muzzle-loading muskets that European producers and traders regarded as obsolete and as an indirect proof of African backwardness. The first section of this article seeks to account for this consumer predilection. The second and third substantive parts of the article explore the provenance of these guns and argue that the lower Congo’s gun trade can be disaggregated into three phases, each of which was marked by the local ascendancy of different trading houses. The most general aim of the article is to make a case for the role of African consumer demand in fostering processes of global economic integration. More specifically, by showing that west-central African demand was responsible for the enduring vitality of Liège’s non-mechanised cottage industry, the article points to an often-overlooked aspect of nineteenth-century globalisation: far from invariably promoting innovation in industrialisation, the growing interdependence of different parts of the world could also have the effect of giving a new lease of life to apparently antiquated manufacturing methods.

This article examines the commerce of firearms in the Congo estuary in the late pre-colonial era. By focusing on the production and circulation of ‘trade guns’—that is, the cheap smoothbore muzzle-loading muskets manufactured in western Europe primarily for the African trade—it makes a general case for the role of African consumer demand in fostering processes of global economic integration in the nineteenth century. More specifically, it shows that lower Congolese demand was largely responsible for the enduring vitality of Liège’s non-mechanized cottage industry and for this Belgian town’s ability to replace Birmingham as the key supplier of arms to west-central Africa. The article, then, points to an often-overlooked aspect of nineteenth-century globalisation: far from invariably promoting innovation in industrialisation, the growing interdependence of different parts of the world could also have the effect of giving a new lease of life to ostensibly antiquated manufacturing methods. The argument is developed in three stages.

First, it is necessary to tease out the reasons why the African communities of the Congo estuary displayed a consistent preference for a technology that European observers regarded as ‘obsolete’ and ‘primitive’, ¹ and, by transitivity, as a proof of African inherent backwardness. Building upon existing work on the ‘domestication’ of imported commodities, ² and engaging with David Edgerton’s call not to underestimate the staying powers of ‘old’ technologies, ³ my analysis shows that the long historical relationship between Africans and firearms is inadequately served by approaches that do not go beyond the service functions of guns and do not foreground the cultural meanings with which imported weapons, and technological objects more generally, were endowed by Africans. ⁴

The effort to periodise and, where possible, to quantify the gun trade of the Congo estuary in the nineteenth century takes up the second part of the article, where an examination is offered of the hitherto understudied commercial entanglements of the region and their European protagonists. ⁵ While the main concern of Roger Anstey’s pioneering book was international diplomacy, ⁶ the river trade has been dealt with only in passing by Phillys Martin and Martin Lynn in their northward-facing studies or by the scores of works centred on Portuguese Angola. ⁷ This comparative neglect is difficult to account for, especially when we consider that it was precisely the highly developed commercial economy of the lower river that would turn it into a focus of intense inter-European rivalry towards the end of the century.

Finally, having dealt with the consumers and the importers of trade guns in west-central Africa, I turn my attention to the world of producers and demonstrate that developments along the lower Congo reflected broader dynamics of change in the European gun industry. As is shown in the third part of this article, the crisis of the Birmingham gun sector and the rise of Liège in the closing decades of the nineteenth century unsettled British gun makers, ⁸ whose perspectives have influenced recent studies. ⁹ Less well appreciated, however, is the extent to which the continuing strength of Liège’s craft industry was a function of its ability to provision the west-central African market. This finding speaks to some pressing concerns of global historians.

During the past twenty or so years, a number of authors have reflected on the relationship between sub-Saharan Africa and modern globalisation, of which industrialisation was an integral part. ¹⁰ The path-breaking work was no doubt Joseph E. Inikori’s Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, ¹¹ which made a powerful case for placing international commerce, and specifically the trans-Atlantic slave trade, at the heart of the English industrialisation processes in the long eighteenth century. ¹² Inikori’s broad perspective permitted him to address both the role of diasporic Africans as coerced producers of raw materials (especially, of course, cotton) for Atlantic commerce and the significance of western Africa and the Americas as overseas markets for English manufactures (especially, of course, cottons). ¹³

It must be said, however, that this initial attention to the wide-ranging effects of African consumer demand is less prominent in Inikori’s later elaborations, including an important article published in the pages of this journal, where Inikori convincingly presents the Atlantic basin as ‘the geographical location of the early development of the modern global economy’, but where the contribution of Africans to the process is (less convincingly) limited to their having supplied the bulk of the slave labour employed in ‘plantation production of commodities in the Americas in the critical period 1650–1850’. ¹⁴

Herein lies the key strength of the work of Jeremy Prestholdt, to whom we owe the most systematic and culturally sensitive attempt to date to foreground the role of African consumer desires in shaping economic developments in distant localities in the nineteenth century. By focusing on the preference of East Africans for unbleached cottons (locally known as merekani), Prestholdt has been able to establish that ‘as East Africans became more deeply affected by contemporary movements of goods, ideas, and people, they also influenced patterns of global trade and foreign production’. ¹⁵ The implication of Prestholdt’s argument—as he himself put it in a slightly earlier article—is that, even at the height of imperialism and Europe’s overseas projection, ‘the shape of world markets has not been determined by Western interests alone’ and that even ostensibly peripheral and marginal communities and ‘individuals have possessed abilities to affect larger frameworks’. ¹⁶

Unlike in Prestholdt’s signature examples (Salem, MA, and Bombay), where technological innovation in the form of industrial mechanisation was a conspicuous outcome of the need to accommodate East African demand for specific types of cloth, the story examined in this article is that of the survival of a long-established craft industry past its ‘sell-by date’. Nonetheless, it is a story that evokes an African centrality that most existing accounts of the growth of global linkages and interdependence have tended (and still tend) to obscure from view. As in the case of Prestholdt’s merekani, then, the manufacture and commerce of trade guns in the second half of the nineteenth century remind us that a focus on African consumer demand might be of value in complicating current understandings of the workings not only of specific economic sectors, but of modern globalisation as well.

Consumers

Throughout the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, the Congo estuary—that is, the ca. 180-km-long navigable stretch comprised between the mouth of the great river and the beginning of the cataracts at Matadi—remained free of direct European political control, the only assertions of European ‘hard power’ being limited to sporadic anti-slavery and anti-piracy patrols and amphibious operations by the West African Squadron of the British Royal Navy from the early 1840s. ¹⁷ This goes some way towards explaining why the exportation of enslaved persons to Brazil and Cuba lasted for as long as it did in the area. Once commercial change did materialise, however, its pace was dizzyingly quick.

In the 1840s, the lower Congo and, especially, the chiefdom of Boma were ‘the principal slave mart[s] on the Western Coast of Africa’. At the time, the estuary was reportedly ‘covered with slave Factories’; numbering about thirty, these belonged mainly to Portuguese/Brazilian and Spanish/Cuban illegal traffickers, who ‘detested’ the ‘British flag’ on account of the surveillance exerted by the West African Squadron. ¹⁸ Exports of legitimate goods—as opposed to slaves, who had hitherto dominated the trading economy of the lower river, leaving precious little space for other commodities—began to pick up in the mid-1850s, when, following the Portuguese occupation of Ambriz, the Liverpool firms of Thomas Tobin & Son (engaged in the produce trade with West Africa since the British Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 ¹⁹ ) and Hatton & Cookson (founded in 1838 ²⁰ ) both settled in Ponta (or Porto) da Lenha, on the north bank of the Congo River, roughly halfway between Boma and the Atlantic coast. In 1856, the value of the palm oil exported from the lower river, where oil palms grew ‘with marvellous exuberance’, ²¹ was estimated at £28,000. ²²

The palm oil (as well as groundnut) trade might have received a temporary setback in 1857–62, as a result of the so-called French ‘Migration Scheme’, that is, the government-sponsored recruitment of indentured migrant workers (‘engagés’) for France’s West Indian possessions. ²³ Administered by the Marseille firm of Régis frères, whose agents settled in Boma and Banana (as well as Loango), the migration scheme gave a renewed boost to the slave trade (since most ostensibly free labourers were actually ‘slaves redeemed from African dealers’ ²⁴ ) and resulted in the exportation of more than 17,000 ‘émigrés’ from the region. To this extent, Richard F. Burton, the explorer turned consul who visited the Congo estuary and the cataracts district in 1863, was certainly correct in describing the ‘engagé’ system as the ‘lineal descendant’ of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. ²⁵

From the early 1860s, however, the estuary’s produce trade developed fast, not least thanks to the efforts of the Dutch firm of Kerdijk & Pincoffs (Afrikaansche Handelsvereeniging [AHV] in 1866–79). The success of the Rotterdam company—in 1863, Elkman, Kerdijk & Pincoffs’s manager in Banana, the Congolese headquarters of the firm, was reported to be shipping about ‘800 Tons of Palm oil annually’ to the Netherlands ²⁶ —was largely the result of the policy of employing ‘a great many of the old Portuguese Slave Dealers as brokers to purchase Oil’. ²⁷ It brought other firms to the area, especially Lasnier, Daumas, Lartigue & C^ie, founded in Le Havre in 1866 by former employees of Régis. Lasnier, Daumas, Lartigue & C^ie (Daumas, Béraud et C^ie from 1879) joined Hatton & Cookson, the only British trading house left in the estuary after the withdrawal of Tobin & Son from the lower river in 1862–63.

Already in late 1866, Commander Peile, of HMS Espoir, stated that he ‘was astonished at the extensive Trade carried on at Embomma [Boma] in Palm Oil, Palm Kernels and Ground Nuts. He was informed, and believes it to be the case, that Legal trade has altogether superseded Slave Trade at that place.’ ²⁸ Ten years later—as Alexandre Delcommune, then a young Belgian employee of Lasnier, Daumas, Lartigue & C^ie, would reminisce—the trade out of Boma ‘was very considerable; for years, thousands of tonnes of palm kernels, groundnuts, sesame and palm oil left the Congo each year to be sold on European markets. … On several occasions, I myself bought more than 25 tonnes of palm kernels, groundnuts and palm oil in one day.’ ²⁹ By that time, the three leading northern European trading houses—the AHV; Lasnier, Daumas, Lartigue & C^ie; and Hatton & Cookson—their Portuguese and Spanish agents, as well as a handful of still-independent Portuguese firms, had begun greatly to expand the scale of their operations. According to Norm Schrag’s calculations, by 1885, there were probably more than 160 active trading establishments (or ‘factories’), and between 225 and 250 foreign traders, in the estuary. ³⁰ Altogether, then, thanks to its natural resources and the repurposing of old slave circuits, the lower Congo adjusted easily to the end of the export slave trade, and the last two decades of the pre-colonial era were a period of relative prosperity for estuary communities, who—as Henry M. Stanley remarked in 1879—benefited from ‘the fierce and sharp competition which exist[ed] between the traders to secure the largest trade’. ³¹

Throughout this period of intense commercial interaction with the outside world, a great variety of commodities were imported into the estuary, as the Luanda-based British consul, Hopkins, reported in 1874.

[C]otton piece goods, such as greys, woven and printed cottons, silks, woollen goods, Malay handkerchiefs, blankets, army, livery, and police coats, woollen and cotton caps, flint muskets, powder, matchets, knives, daggers, brass rods and chains, padlocks, small metal bells, beads, salt, rum, gin, and liqueurs; and with these goods are purchased palm oil, palm kernels, pea nuts, sesame seed, and rubber. ³²

Insofar as firearms were concerned, however, lower Congo consumers displayed a consistent preference for flintlock muzzle-loading muskets, the so-called ‘trade’ or ‘African’ (or, in earlier days, ‘slave’) guns. Writing in the mid-1860s, John D. Goodman, the chairman of the newly formed Birmingham Small Arms Company, stated that while ‘the taste of the African [was] fickle in the matter of beads’, it was not ‘so with guns, wherein he rejects all improvements, and rigidly adheres to the old flint musket, with its bright barrel, which his father and his grandfather used before him’. ³³ While Goodman’s assertion of a kind of inherent African conservatism is open to doubt, he was certainly correct about the dominance of flintlocks on the west-central African market—as is borne out by additional evidence from the same decade. In 1867, for instance, the BaSolongo of the southern bank of the estuary ‘possess[ed] no arms but trade guns’; ³⁴ two years later, flintlocks were reported to be the only marketable models of firearms in Ambrizete, to the south of the estuary. ³⁵ The situation remained unchanged during the following fifteen or so years: in 1878 Boma, if we are to believe Delcommune, ‘all the natives … were … armed with flint guns’. ³⁶ Four years later, the followers of Ngaliema, the Teke chief of Kintamo, on the southern shore of Stanley (Malebo) Pool, had invested some at least of the proceeds of their growing ivory trade in flintlocks, of which they possessed more than 1,000. ³⁷

This demonstrable predilection for ‘guns of the cheapest description’, made using ‘a low quality of iron’ for the barrels and wood liable ‘to expand and shrink’ for the stocks, requires clarification. ³⁸ Was the weight of tradition (as suggested by Goodman) a truly significant factor? The preference for flintlocks over percussion locks is easy to explain and must be attributed to the frequent scarcity of the caps required to fire the latter. Flintstones, conversely, were everywhere to be found. ³⁹ Being typically made from ‘soft’ wrought iron (as opposed to ‘hard’ steel), smoothbore muzzle-loaders were a more accessible (as well as cheaper) technology than rifles. ⁴⁰ Although direct evidence pertaining to the lower Congo is thin on the ground, it would be surprising if local craftsmen had not drawn on existing iron-working skills to prolong the lifespan of a damaged weapon and/or to keep a faulty one in working order. This, certainly, was a common occurrence across the broader region, for instance among the Chokwe, one of whose ironsmiths was put to the test by the Hungarian trader László Magyar in the 1850s. The artisan in question was given

a damaged musket without lock for repair, and as a sample a French flintlock on whose cover the word ‘Laport’ was engraved. After some days the blacksmith returned the musket in working order. He had not only manufactured the lock well and neatly, but also faithfully engraved the word ‘Laport’ on the cover, with the letters being only somewhat less subtle. ⁴¹

In terms of functional usage, flintlocks, given their limited penetrative power, are unlikely ever to have proved very helpful in big-game hunting, which in the Congo estuary meant primarily hippos, who, ‘with their thick hides, … cared nothing for native flint-lock guns, and knew nothing of more serious weapons’. ⁴² Their military applications, however, were not to be looked down upon, especially because the dense mangrove swamps and natural canals of this ‘vegetable Venice’ ⁴³ enabled gunmen familiar with the terrain to converge on the enemy without being detected. Thus, in 1867, when the Royal Navy contemplated a large-scale punitive expedition against a BaSolongo group, who had burnt down and plundered a Hatton & Cookson factory in Santo Antonio late in 1866, both Captain Grubbe and Captain Ruxton, officers of the West African Squadron, cautioned against underestimating the effects of trade guns in narrow, mangrove-flanked brooks. There, such muskets, their long loading time and short range notwithstanding, could be ‘destructive to the crew of boats who cannot see their enemies’. ⁴⁴

At the time, the prospective operation did not materialise. The following year, however, three British tenders went up Malela Creek (not far from Ponta da Lenha) to punish the pirates who had seized ‘a Launch with a Cargo of gunpowder’ belonging to the AHV. The land party encountered no resistance as it set the guilty village on fire and destroyed both its crops and canoes. As Commander Johnstone’s boats began their return journey, however, they came under sustained fire. Attempts to respond proved fruitless, since ‘no one was visible, and the bush too thick to allow of landing’. Six men experienced ‘gunshot wounds produced by iron slugs of various sizes’. ⁴⁵ The casualties suffered by the British on this occasion illustrate two other key advantages of heavy-calibre, smoothbore muzzle-loaders. Not only were they well suited to the low-quality, coarse trade gunpowder imported into west-central Africa by European firms, ⁴⁶ but they could also be used with almost any projectile: iron slugs, of course, but also ‘bits of copper ingots’ and even ‘stones’ (pierres). ⁴⁷

As I have argued elsewhere, ⁴⁸ imported firearms—like other externally introduced technologies and commodities—were also endowed with less predictable symbolic attributes that spoke to the receiving communities’ socio-cultural norms and structures. The history of firearms in Africa, that is, can hardly be reduced to their utilitarian value. When examined from this perspective, the popularity of trade guns in the Congo estuary might be better grasped. Among Kikongo-speakers noise was understood to have the power both to drive away harmful spirits and to facilitate entry into the spirit world ⁴⁹ —hence the role of gun firing, not only ‘as a sign of rejoicing’ in the context of celebratory events (such as weddings), ⁵⁰ but also, and especially, during funerals, of which it became a key ingredient over the course of the nineteenth century or earlier. According to the trader Charles Jeannest, who worked for Lasnier, Daumas, Lartigue & C^ie in 1869–73, there could be no ‘good burial without making a racket’. ⁵¹ At least in northern Angola, the bang produced by the heavy charges that large-calibre, smoothbore muzzle-loaders could withstand was magnified by loading them ‘with a tamping of “fuba”, or fine mandioca-meal, instead of other wadding, and they then give a terrific report when fired off, and not unfrequently burst’. ⁵² To account for the great quantities of gunpowder kept by the AHV in Banana in 1879, Stanley went so far as to suggest the existence of a kind of fixed chart: ‘every child that dies receives a salute of honour of five shots, while a woman has ten, and a man twenty: for a chief ten or twelve barrels might not suffice’. ⁵³ Ten years later, it was still unimaginable that a celebration or funeral would take place on the lower Congo without ‘expressing emotion by firing loose powder [i.e., blanks]’. ⁵⁴

Trade guns were also appropriated as symbols of power and signs of status and wealth, which explains why political and economic authorities in the Congo estuary invariably made it a point of surrounding themselves with as many gunmen as possible. ⁵⁵ When firearms were so deployed, their practical efficacy ceased to be a determining factor, as noted in 1882 by Fr Prosper Augouard, whose host, ‘king Koukoulou’ of the BaSolongo, moved about with ‘a large escort armed with guns. Granted, some of these guns had no hammer; but they still made up the numbers.’ ⁵⁶ The association between wealth and firearms may have given rise to the practice of utilising trade muskets as units of account for ivory transactions. This instance of user re-innovation—in which guns were employed to measure the value of ivory without being ‘necessarily exchanged. If the agreed-upon price for a certain tusk was five guns, for example, the seller would then pick out five guns’ worth of cloth, gunpowder, and other items’ ⁵⁷ —is mentioned in several nineteenth-century sources and bears witness to the local popularity and diffusion of trade guns at the time. ⁵⁸ While obviously an exaggeration, there was thus some truth to US envoy W. P. Tisdel’s remark that, among the ‘tribes’ of the Congo valley, the gun was used ‘for everything but for war purposes or the killing of game’. ⁵⁹

Importers

The functional and symbolic applications discussed in the previous section explain why the lower Congo’s demand for trade guns remained high and consistent throughout the nineteenth century. The world of importers, conversely, experienced more change, and the evidence presented in this section suggests that the Congo estuary’s gun trade in the late pre-colonial period can be disaggregated into three consecutive phases.

Even though some Portuguese-made guns (including the so-called lazarinos or lazarinas, the famous flintlocks churned out by the workshop of Lázaro Lazarino of Braga ⁶⁰ ) must have found their way to the lower Congo in the early years of century, throughout the decades of the illegal slave trade and up to the mid-1860s, the bulk of the muskets bartered in the estuary and surrounding areas no doubt originated in what was then ‘the Small Arms arsenal of the world’, ⁶¹ Birmingham, which had had a very substantial gun trade with West Africa since the eighteenth century. ⁶² Birmingham trade guns were imported into the lower Congo—often via Brazil—both by Brazilian and Portuguese slave dealers and by the aforementioned Liverpool trading houses, which were seeking to expand the produce trade on the west-central African coast. ⁶³ Writing in the mid-1860s, Goodman estimated Birmingham’s annual gun exports ‘to the West Coast of Africa’ at ‘probably 100,000 to 150,000’. ⁶⁴ We, of course, do not know precisely how many of these ‘African guns’ ended up in the Congo estuary, but there is at least one indirect indication that their number was not insignificant. In the summer of 1862, the Governor General of Angola, whose commitment to preventing the departure of slave ships from Luanda to the mouth of the Congo was being called into question by Commissioner Edmund Gabriel, polemically suggested that the best possible way of reducing slave sales on the lower river was to prohibit the trade in ‘powder and arms, now almost exclusively furnished by English commerce’. As he explained to Foreign Secretary Russel, Gabriel had snubbed the Governor’s proposition both because he thought its utility was doubtful and because he knew that its ‘pernicious effects … on British commerce in this quarter might be extensively felt’. ⁶⁵

A number of French muskets were certainly introduced into the estuary at the time of the ‘Migration Scheme’, when Régis agents in Boma were ‘paying as much as 5l. or 6l. sterling each for [slaves] in well-assorted goods’. ⁶⁶ Yet it was an ‘astonishingly bold move’ ⁶⁷ by Lasnier, Daumas, Lartigue & C^ie that brought the local dominance of English trade guns to an end in the late 1860s. In 1868, the Havre-based company purchased ‘around six hundred thousand old French army flintlocks still in the possession of the State’. ⁶⁸ Over the course of the next one or two years, almost half of the 600,000 muskets were sent to west and west-central Africa—so much so that when, upon the outbreak of war with Prussia in the summer of 1870, the French government requested that the guns be returned, only 330,000 were left in France. ⁶⁹ This unprecedented availability of former military guns sparked the ‘envy’ of ‘other companies’, which did not ‘stock that item’. ⁷⁰ It also did wonders for the local reputation of Lasnier, Daumas, Lartigue & C^ie, which became ‘renowned for the excellence of its firearms’, ⁷¹ and probably resulted in qualitative improvement. At least according to the missionary W. Holman Bentley, in the early 1860s, the people of São Salvador ‘did not trust the guns and powder of the quality then sold, they missed fire too often’. By the end of the following decade, however, ‘bows and arrows and spears had entirely disappeared, except as toys or for rat hunts, and guns were common and cheap’. ⁷²

The French trading house, however, could not repeat its exploit a few years later: when, in the mid-1870s, the French government put on the market ‘some substantial quantities’ of discarded percussion-lock muskets, these were quickly snapped up by Liégeois traders-contractors (fabricants), who promptly had them converted into flintlocks—an instance of technological ‘regression’ that was clearly dictated by the preferences of African consumers, who ‘only wanted this mechanism’. ⁷³ If we are to believe the merchant Marius Daumas, a key problem that explains the brevity of French hegemony over the lower Congo’s gun trade was the absence of national steamship services and the high transport costs that this deficiency entailed. Until the early 1880s, the mail steamers calling regularly at the Congo mouth were all British; ⁷⁴ and while both the (N)AHV and Hatton & Cookson had invested in company steamships, Daumas, Béraud et C^ie continued to rely on ‘two good sailing ships’ to serve the route to western Europe. ⁷⁵

Liège’s readiness to expand its ‘age-old’ ⁷⁶ reconditioning business was one of the reasons why, after the French interlude, it was Belgian, rather than English, contractors and manufacturers who proved able to intercept the estuary’s continuing demand for flintlocks. The others were the cheapness of Belgian arms and the adaptability and astuteness of the country’s gun workers, who—as Birmingham producers were wont to lament—had no compunction about making extensive use of English-made and -proofed barrels. This enabled Belgian fabricants to pass the firearms assembled in Liège for Birmingham guns, whose proof mark was reportedly ‘regarded as a certificate of good quality’ by African consumers long accustomed with it. ⁷⁷ Open counterfeiting took place as well, and it was not limited to English proof and trade marks. ⁷⁸ According to the explorer Serpa Pinto, for instance, the lazarinos that circulated in the interior of Angola in the late 1870s were all ‘manufactured in Belgium’, but still bore the ‘name of Lazaro—lazarino, a native of Braga— … unblushingly engraved on the barrels of the pieces manufactured … for the blacks—and which are but a clumsy imitation of the perfect weapon turned out by the celebrated Portuguese gunsmith’. ⁷⁹

The Société commerciale belge Gillis et C^ie, a Belgian trading company associated with Stanley’s ongoing state-building activities on the lower Congo, made its appearance on the estuary in the early 1880s, establishing bases ‘brimming with Belgian-made goods’ both in Boma and Noki. ⁸⁰ By then, however, all the large trading firms active on the lower river were expanding the number of their factories and had begun to deal extensively in Liège-produced or -refitted guns. ⁸¹ The most representative case is that of the Nieuwe Afrikaansche Handels Vennootschap (NAHV), which had replaced the AHV following the latter’s famous bankruptcy in 1879. ⁸² All the sources agree that, vis-à-vis its local rivals, the new Dutch company was a true giant: endowed with a ‘capital of £200,000’, it employed between 50 and 60 ‘white agents’ (mainly Dutch and Portuguese) in its Banana headquarters and plenty more in its factories dotted along the lower Congo and adjoining sections of the Atlantic coastline. ⁸³ It had its own fleet of ocean-worthy steamers and also made use of additional freight space on British and German steamships. ⁸⁴ In 1886, Giacomo Bove, a visiting Italian explorer, was told that the NAHV imported ‘at least 25,000 guns per year’ (as well as ‘some hundred thousand casks of gin’) through Banana. ⁸⁵ The NAHV’s own figures are similar and give a yearly average of ca. 24,000 for the 1884–88 period. Most of these were discarded French percussion guns which had been converted into flintlocks at Liège. ⁸⁶ Since French and probably even English trading firms sold weapons of the same provenance on the lower river, ⁸⁷ Belgian geographer Alphonse-Jules Wauters cannot have been wide off the mark when he remarked that, in the mid-1880s, Liège enjoyed a ‘monopoly, as it were, over the supply of guns’ to the Congo. ⁸⁸

Producers

The changes described in the previous section reflect—and should be understood as local manifestations of—broader trends in the international gun sector. There are, indeed, more general indications of the rise of Liège as a gun manufacturing centre for the African and other trades from the mid-1870s and of the coeval, and related, decline of Birmingham. Before presenting this evidence, however, it might be helpful briefly to survey the development, international connections, and internal organisation of the two towns’ trade gun industries.

As mentioned earlier, Birmingham’s trade gun exports to West Africa had begun to grow significantly in the eighteenth century, when both English and continental European slave traders contributed to entrench the popularity of Birmingham-made muskets on the Atlantic coast of Africa. ⁸⁹ Even though Priya Satia has argued that state purchases of military weapons, or parts thereof, were more profitable to Birmingham gun-contractors than private trade and therefore played a more important role in precipitating economic and industrial change in the English Midlands, ⁹⁰ with ‘something between 200,000 and 150,000 guns [being] unloaded yearly on the African coast in the second half of the eighteenth century by English merchants’, ⁹¹ the significance of trade guns can hardly be overestimated. At least in the period 1796 to 1805, Atlantic Africa absorbed almost half (44%) of English gun exports. ⁹² In previous decades, moreover, Birmingham trade guns had also made some inroads into a number of other markets, especially the North American one. Increase in exports drove the overall growth of the sector: in the late eighteenth century, the making of small arms in Birmingham already employed between 4,000 and 5,000 people, who, according to John Whately, one of the town’s most important gun manufacturers, ‘in time of peace, [were] almost entirely supported by the African trade’. ⁹³

The manufacture of the first Liégeois ‘armes de traite’ (also known as ‘fusils pour les sauvages’) dated probably to the end of the seventeenth century, when some of their number found their way to the Native American Indians of present-day New York State. ⁹⁴ Their quantities and variety grew over the course of the eighteenth century, when Belgian trade guns—whose design was, as a rule, inspired by that of pre-existing muskets, such as, for instance, the British infantry firearm, the ‘Brown Bess’—were exported to the Mediterranean, the Americas, and the slave trading areas of West Africa mainly via Dutch, French, and Portuguese ports. ⁹⁵ At the end of the century, the total sector workforce in Liège was estimated at 2,000–2,500, ⁹⁶ still only half that of Birmingham’s. The real boom dated to the following century, as attested by the fact that the ‘siècle d’or’ of Belgian gun making witnessed a ‘spectacular’ increase in the number of Liège-based fabricants (from 36 in 1816 to 174 in 1884), the most successful of whom were—just like in Birmingham—admitted into the ranks of the town’s wealthy bourgeoisie. ⁹⁷

Throughout the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the arrival in Europe of the mechanised ‘American System’ from the late 1850s, ⁹⁸ trade guns continued to be entirely or predominantly handmade. Describing the organisation of the business in Birmingham in the early 1860s, Goodman stressed its highly ‘subdivided’ and specialised character. The ‘chief branches’ were ‘stock, barrel, lock, furniture, and oddwork making’, the various components being produced by distinct tradesmen and then ‘collected by the manufacturer, known as gunmaker’. ⁹⁹ Although this ‘system [made] it extremely difficult to obtain a correct estimate of the number of workmen employed in the trade’, Goodman put it at 7,340, subdivided into 3,420 ‘material makers’ (whose ranks included, for example, 700 ‘barrel welders’ and 1,200 ‘lock forgers’) and 3,920 ‘setters-up’ (among whom were 1,000 ‘stockers’, 1,000 ‘screwers’, etc.). And to these one needed to add ‘a considerable number’ of underage boys ‘employed mainly in carrying the work from one to another, as it passes through his several stages’. ¹⁰⁰

Extreme task specialisation and the smallness of independent productive units had also characterised the gun making sector in Liège from the outset. This organisation of labour would prove long-lasting and was, indeed, still predominant in as late as 1906, as British Consul Hertslet reported.

The manufacturer buys the barrels, which have been tested in their roughly-made state, from the piece-workers who makes them, and then hands them over to the fitter (also frequently a piece-worker) who welds the single barrels together. The barrels are then returned to the manufacturer, and passed on by him to the breech-fitter, who fits the breeches and barrels together; the breech-piece, manufactured by machinery, is furnished to the breech-fitter, who is required to properly fashion it before fitting it to the barrels. The pieces, mechanically stamped out, which form the lock, are finished and put together by the lock-maker. The lock is then attached to the barrels by another workman, described at Liège as the ‘Systémeur’, and by yet another workman is fitted with is stock. When all the various parts are in order and fitted together the guns are submitted to the finisher …, who sees that they are properly adjusted. The guns are then submitted to the processes of nickeling, polishing, and engraving, &c ¹⁰¹

Despite their similarities, the Birmingham and Liège gun industries were set apart by two main factors. Firstly, Belgian workers were paid significantly less than their British counterparts. In the late 1850s, for instance, while ‘the weekly wages of Birmingham gunmakers, outworkers, and boy-assistants ranged from 30 shillings to £6, 15 to 25 shillings, and 5 to 10 shillings respectively, Liège gunmakers were paid the equivalent of just 12 to 17 shillings’. ¹⁰² This wage differential meant that Liège-made weapons could be sold more cheaply than Birmingham ones. And this, in turn, as Emrys Chews explains, enabled ‘Liège to capture a larger share of the market at opportune moments, beginning with the cheaper end of the small arms trade’. ¹⁰³ The second difference was that while in Birmingham the business was workshop-based, homeworking remained the chief form of labour in Liège. ¹⁰⁴ Frequently ‘aided by members of their families’, including women and children employed as porters or in other auxiliary roles, cottage workers were ‘grouped, in accordance with their particular branch of the trade, in various quarters of Liège and in the neighbouring suburbs’. ¹⁰⁵

Figures from the two towns’ proof houses offer a rough illustration of the state of the industries at the height of the lower Congo’s gun trade. The total number of gun barrels marked or punched (poinçonné) at the Liège proof house rose from 7 million in the 1860s to almost 10 million in the 1880s. ¹⁰⁶ In the terminology of the business, trade guns (as well as some other single-shot weapons) fell into two categories: ‘fusils à un coup’ and ‘fusils de bord’. ¹⁰⁷ In 1860, the Liège proof house tested 192,333 barrels destined to be assembled into these two types of guns. The figure then grew to 226,980, in 1870, 248,582, in 1880, and 372,581, in 1889—the yearly average for the period 1870–79 being 225,144 and almost 300,000 (296,688) for the subsequent decade, that is, an increase of more than 30%. ¹⁰⁸ Assuming that, at least in the 1880s, trade guns represented approximately one-half of the aggregate number of fusils à un coup and fusils de bord, an intelligent guess would be that, at the time, one in six or seven of the barrels proofed in Liège belonged to Africa- or Latin America-bound muskets.

Evidence from the Birmingham proof house reveals an opposite picture, as the total number of tests decreased from close to 7 million in the 1870s (6,674,629) to about 6 million in the 1880s (5,906,088) and to less than 4 million in the 1890s (3,920,466). ¹⁰⁹ But the best indication of the contraction of the African gun trade out of Birmingham is that, as the century wore on, the number of Birmingham-made and -proofed barrels absorbed by Liégeois contractors continued to increase. In 1890, for instance, gunmaker Samuel B. Allport estimated that, of the 176,000 ‘African barrels’ tested in Birmingham, ‘as many as 100,000 [were] exported direct from the Proof House to Belgium, to be there made up into guns’. ¹¹⁰

Export figures, too, bear out Birmingham’s loss of the African market. If, in 1850–54, ‘West Africa’ had still absorbed, on average, 17.8% of British firearms exports, that percentage more than halved in twenty years, reaching 7.7% in 1870–74. It then climbed back a little in 1880–84 (10.3%) but plummeted to a mere 6.3% during the succeeding five years (1885–89). ¹¹¹

The monetary worth of gun exports from Britain and Belgium tells the same story. If the value of the two countries’ exports was still broadly comparable in the five-year period between 1860 and 1864 (£3,137,448 [UK]; £3,530,691 [Belgium]), and if the UK could still have the edge over Belgium in select years (e.g., in 1870, when the guns exported from Britain were worth £871,419, as against Belgium’s £562,720), by 1880, Belgium’s supremacy was well established (£579,320 vs. £307,059). By 1890, the gap had become unbridgeable, as Belgian gun exports (£654,250) were worth more than twice the value of British exports (£273,280). ¹¹² In ca. 1900, the value of the Belgian gun trade to Africa would be estimated at £80,000 per year (roughly equivalent to today’s £12,000,000), more than 10% of the total worth of Belgium’s gun exports at the time. ¹¹³

Birmingham’s ouster from the African market in the last quarter of the nineteenth century contributed greatly to the fading away of its time-honoured subdivided contract system, which survived only on the outer edges of a trade that was now moving steadily in the direction of the mechanised production of interchangeable arms. Conversely, Liège’s ability, first, to make significant inroads into, and then to dominate, the same market goes a long way towards explaining the endurance and ‘unquestionable prosperity’ of its arms industry, which—notwithstanding its ‘outmoded organisation’ (organisation vieillotte)—was still believed, in 1896, to provide a living to almost 9,000 cottage workers (out of a total sector workforce of 13,000, up from about 9,500 in 1856). ¹¹⁴

Conclusion

‘Africanist researchers’, Patrick Manning wrote in 2013, ‘have been slow to assert an integral place for the continent in world affairs.’ ¹¹⁵ More than ten years down the line, the continent’s modes of incorporation into nineteenth-century globalising trade networks remain insufficiently researched. Still less well understood is the impact of Africa itself on such networks and the industries that fed them. This is regrettable, since ‘mutual interaction’, as opposed to ‘unilateral diffusion’, is what genuine global histories should ultimately be about, lest they reprise the old imperial emphasis on the dominant influence of western outsiders on African development. ¹¹⁶

Unlike in the North American and Indian textile sectors examined by Prestholdt, ¹¹⁷ west-central Africa’s continuing demand for trade guns did not accelerate processes of industrial mechanisation. Precisely the opposite was true: at least in Belgium, it proved highly instrumental in keeping alive (and well) a traditional craft industry that was disappearing elsewhere. This finding foregrounds a somewhat paradoxical feature of nineteenth-century globalisation—one which has not received sufficient attention, but which becomes clearly visible once the research focus moves away from British industry to other, comparatively neglected, European productive centres, such as Liège.

The effects of African consumer demand were thus ambivalent, promoting innovation in some sectors and discouraging it in others. From the perspective of global historians, however, the demonstrable influence of this demand itself is arguably even more consequential than the duality of its outcomes. The industrial and social history of Liège—to put it clearly—would have been significantly different in the absence of the African gun trade, and this should be of interest to all students of the dialectical relationship through which African and extra-African locales shaped one another over the course of the nineteenth century. The story of this town, then, serves as a reminder that it was not only as producers of primary commodities, or by being forcefully removed from the continent, that Africans could affect the globalisation process. A focus on African consumption practices, in sum, might be what is needed to break away from what Omar Gueye has memorably termed ‘the fetishism of the slave trade and colonialism as the only way to study African history in global terms’ and to demonstrate that Africans were more than bit players in the construction of the modern economy. ¹¹⁸