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[^0]:    1 The discussion in this section of the chapter is based largely on Inikori, "Reversal of Fortune," pp. 56-88.  
by the interior savannah regions operating largely as the manufacturing and trading economies, exchanging their manufactures and mercantile services mainly for the primary products of the economies on the Atlantic coast and their immediate hinterlands. By the mid-fifteenth century, when the Portuguese arrived, the commercializing process in West Africa had made much progress. The economies in the region were far more commercial (with well-established exchange currencies, especially cowries and copper rods) than those of the Americas; they were also far more densely populated and urbanized (Inikori, 2014, pp. 58-66).  
Because the first two hundred years or so of European commercial enterprise (1450-1650) focused mainly on products derived from West Africa's natural resources and labour (gold, mostly from modern Ghana, sugar, mostly from São Tomé, cotton cloth and red pepper from the Benin kingdom, hides and skins from Senegambia, ivory and woods from south-eastern Nigeria and the Windward Coast) the preceding process of development and commercialization was further reinforced. The commodity composition of the imports brought by the European traders during these early decades makes this clear. Commodity currencies (cowries and copper rods) overwhelmingly dominated the imports, indicating traders' demand for currency to meet the needs of expanding local and interregional trade; there were little or no firearms (Inikori, 2009, pp; 101-104).