A standard economic intuition is that inefficient institutions are competed away over time. Slavery, by that logic, should have collapsed long before any abolitionist movement arose. A slave will value their own freedom above any market price. Why, then, was the contract that would have priced this so rarely written?
Warren Whatley is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Michigan and a leading scholar of the economic history of Africa and African Americans. His new book, Slavery, Freedom and Development: How Africa Became the Mirror Image of Europe (Cambridge University Press), examines why the two sides of the Atlantic moved in opposite directions over six centuries.
The conversation opens in Baghdad in 1974, where Warren spent a year as an undergraduate exchange student. Working with contacts to Stokely Carmichael and Bob Moses, he helped form a Pan-African Student Union at the University of Baghdad. The episode that stayed with him was a delegation of Berber students arguing that they were African and had never been Arabised. Their case forced him to revise the Philadelphia-shaped notion of African identity he had arrived with. The book is dedicated to comrades from that year, with whom he has since lost contact.
The central argument is the following. Between roughly the thirteenth and twentieth centuries, Western Europe moves out of feudalism toward modernity, while Africa over the same period moves in the opposite direction. The two trajectories are not merely different. They are systematically inverse. Freedom develops in Western Europe as a property of place, captured in the legal idea of “free air”, while the Atlantic slave trade reshapes African political and social life around the logic of capture.
Whatley proposes a mechanism that sits between the supply-side and demand-side accounts of the trade. Call it the gun-slave cycle. European buyers exchanged firearms alongside other goods for captives. Once one society armed itself, its neighbour faced a choice: arm and raid, or be raided. The result is a prisoner’s-dilemma arms race that spreads region by region and changes the norms of conflict.
This sets up the book’s hardest question. Roman law contained the peculium: a mechanism by which an enslaved person could accumulate property and purchase their freedom. The historical record shows that wherever manumission was allowed, slaves paid above the market price for their own bodies. Yet such contracts were rarely offered, and in the United States South they were sometimes illegal. Had that path been open, Whatley argues, the subsequent history of race in the United States would look quite different. Why the market did not produce abolition on its own is, in his view, an open question for economists.
Two threads carry the argument toward the present. The first is patriarchy: Western slavery fixed slave status to the mother, which allowed free men to father both free and enslaved children and made the system reproducible without internal contradiction. The second is customary law, which in much of Africa absorbed kinship-embedded slavery and carried its norms forward into the colonial and postcolonial period. Whatley sees this as the most plausible site for expanding freedom today. On reparations, he is cautious. The arms-race framing complicates any single line of attribution within Africa, and he points instead to the local: customary law, gender equality, and political participation as the practical terrain on which freedom is won.
The song for this episode is What Home Could Be, a Suno-generated piece built from Warren’s own research. Have a listen!
This is the last podcast of season 2. A special thank you, first, to Vasti Calitz and Andri Burnett of VoiceNote productions for their behind-the-scenes work to turn our casual conversations into professional productions. And then to the brilliant Jonathan Schoots, who, brilliant as he is, is just not quite smart enough to know how to accurately price his time. Until then, I – and the many listeners to the podcast series – are the lucky beneficiaries.
