Long-distance exchange and the formation of the State: the case of the Abron kingdom of Gyaman

Abstract

In the view of several present-day historians and economists, including Samir Amin, Catherine Coquery and Yves Person, the structure of precolonial African socio-economic formations may be described as the combination of peasant communities organising their labour without outside interference, and of warrior aristocracies basing their wealth and power on their control of long-distance trade. In my own view, this picture underestimates the economic and social role played in many formations by captives: in Gyaman and in Ashanti, it is essentially captives who produce the surplus from which the aristocracy's means of domination are drawn; and long-distance trade functions to allow the aristocracy to ‘realise’ the surplus product extracted from its captives' labour, not directly to obtain resources for itself in the form of rights or tolls. These social formations are therefore constituted by the conjunction of a kin-based tributary mode of production based on the exploitation of slave labour. In conclusion, I raise the question as to whether this kind of structure is not the foundation of most social formations of pre-colonial Africa, at least where States have been in existence.