The effective colonization of Africa was preceded by a period of great exploration.
The 18th century was the Age of Enlightenment in France. Diderot and d’Alembert’s encyclopedia, published between 1751 and 1772, propagated humanist ideas. A little later, abolitionist organizations were created in England, where the influence of the French intelligentsia was far from negligible, to campaign against the slave trade and slavery, such as the Anti-Slavery Society, established in the first third of the 19th century. These ideas contributed to a “moral revolution” and an “abolitionist surge in the West”, which led Denmark to abolish the slave trade de jure in 1792, followed by England in 1807, the United States in 1808, Sweden in 1813, France in 1815 (on the occasion of the Congress of Vienna), Spain and Portugal in 1817, and Brazil only in 1850. England, at the forefront of the abolitionist movement and “sea policeman”, worked, from 1807 and especially from 1833, to enforce the ban on the slave trade in West African waters with varying degrees of success. The Atlantic slave trade obviously did not stop suddenly; it continued illegally until the beginning of the 20th century. Thus, although “seriously combated after 1842, the traffic did not disappear from the coasts of Loango until the 1900s.”
However, at the same time, Arab and intra-African slave trade continued and expanded. Intra-African slave trade even increased in the 19th century because export crops (palm oil, peanuts, honey, cloves, rubber, cotton), which used slave labor, developed as part of trade with Europeans. Slavery on the eastern coast benefited from the decline in the Atlantic slave trade; at the end of the 19th century, the largest slave market on the continent was Zanzibar, at the time under the control of the Sultanate of Oman. As for the north coast of Africa, it saw corsairs operating until the beginning of the 19th century. European penetration would put an end to the Arab and intra-African slave trade, which had continued until the early years of the 20th century.
For more information :
- https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portail:Afrique
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa
- https://africacenter.org/
- https://journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/
- https://etudes-africaines.cnrs.fr/
- https://journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/
- https://www.afdb.org/fr/documents-publications/economic-perspectives-en-afrique-2024
