# West African economies and the rise of the Atlantic economy  
As a Yoruba proverb says, 'the person whose head is used in breaking a coconut does not participate in the eating'. As shown in the preceding section, the forced shipment of African captives and their coerced employment in large-scale production of export commodities in the Americas was the main factor in the emergence of the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy. Like the person whose head is used in breaking a coconut, the economies of West Africa paid dearly for the role their forced migrants played in the rise of the Atlantic economy. Before the fifteenth-century Portuguese explorations opened up opportunities for direct seaborne Atlantic trade with Western Europe, West Africa had exploited the available opportunities to build up a steadily growing interregional trade and specialization, in which internal factors (differing natural resource endowments, population growth and concentration, prevalence of peace provided by emerging effective states, etc.) played the dominant role, but aided by external ones, such as trans-Saharan gold exports to the commercializing economies of the Middle East and from there to Europe, and trade with the copper and salt producing economies of the southern Sahara. ${ }^{1}$  
The emerging interregional division of labour, driven by trade directed by merchants based in the Niger Bend (the inland Niger Delta), was characterized  
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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.