(1) European imports responded to African demands and had to adapt to the necessities of Igbo economy.

Afigbo and others are we beginning to understand that the economy of Igboland has relied for its subsistence equilibrium and the development of specialized crafts on an intensive internal exchange, which was virtually independent from overseas trade. The transatlantic trade through the Biafran coast from the i6th century onwards has been regarded by numerous authors as the key to the development of an internal trade and market structure in Igboland. This article aims to deepen our understanding of how animals bound European and African slave traders together into new networks of exchange, and how some animals threatened the stability of their partnerships. However, vermin animals impeded these connections by destroying valuable commodities, including trade goods and human captives. These exchanges gradually produced and constituted an ecocultural network of human and animal social relationships and cross-cultural negotiations that enabled the expansion of England’s involvement in the slave trade from the Gambia River to the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin. Traders used the shells of cowry sea snails as abstract currency to purchase captives. Slave traders from the Royal African Company and diverse West African polities offered each other livestock for sacrifice or as diplomatic gifts to formalise political or commercial alliances. This article examines how English and West African agents involved in the slave trade in Atlantic Africa used animals to establish trust, forge political bonds, connect distant spaces through a shared medium of exchange, and create regular trading networks from the late seventeenth century until the early eighteenth century.

A fistfull of shells