The connection of Atlantic slavery to production is a topic of importance to the early modern history of Atlantic Africa, a subject which after a couple of decades of neglect is now being studied with renewed concentration by historians. The legacy of the nineteenth-century transition to ‘legitimate’ trade and the imposition of a cash-crop economy not only involved a rupture from preceding mixed agricultural economies but also the obscuring of how these economies operated and how they interacted with and were related to the expansion of Atlantic trade from the fifteenth century onwards. New studies, located primarily in Upper Guinea, have illustrated not only how some African societies changed their methods and crops of production, but also how existing techniques were then transferred to the Americas.

What has emerged is that the relationship between production and Atlantic slavery is highly complex. Where commercial agriculture is concerned, there could be two perspectives that would ask us to see how or whether commercial agriculture was seen as a viable alternative to the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the early period of Atlantic trade, and if not why not. From the African perspective we could ask whether, given that we know how African societies did reshape their productive systems in the Atlantic era, societies in Atlantic Africa could substitute agricultural exports for a trade in slaves, and if so under what conditions this happened.