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Abstract
West Africa in the fifteenth-century was a mosaic of societies and cultures scattered over a vast territory of savanna and forest, loosely connected by ties of trade and politics. The centre of gravity of the commercial and political life lay in the interior, but the coastal regions were in many instances well connected with it. When the Portuguese reached West Africa in the mid-fifteenth century, they met there with long-established patterns and networks of regional and long-distance exchange. Slaves, gold, spices, ivory, iron, local textiles and sea salt travelled north, in return for copper and brass, Sudanese and trans-Saharan manufactures, Saharan rock-salt, and horses. Because of the distance involved, the coastal regions were constantly undersupplied by the northern goods while their own purchasing power was considerable. These circumstances assured the Portuguese, who traded in the same assortment of merchandise as the northern African merchants, of a ready market, as long as the quality of what they had to offer matched that of the northern wares. All impact of the Portuguese trade on West African trading patterns was limited by its low volume, however, partly due to the policies of the Portuguese Crown, which restricted private participation. The theories charging that the early Atlantic trade negatively affected the African inland trade are grossly exaggerated. Likewise, the imports of West African commodities to Portugal played a limited role in the European economy and cannot be considered a major factor in its dynamics.
