Strictly speaking, the only European colony on the Western side of Africa before the end of the eighteenth century was Portuguese Angola. Elsewhere Europeans who settled to trade paid rent for their settlements to African rulers. Sovereignty was not surrendered. African rulers followed the precedent set in 1482, when the Portuguese were grudgingly permitted to build a fort at Elmina in return for a regularly paid rent. There were a few exceptions to this rule, but normally European traders were only allowed to settle in West Africa if they made regular payments in return. There was no transfer of sovereignty in these settlements.

All along the coast African rulers and European traders were united by the reciprocal obligations of ‘landlord’ and ‘stranger’. The land-lords protected their strangers and undertook to provide them with trade. Hence, in the period of the slave trade, Europeans did not appear in West Africa north of the equator as invaders or masters, but as equal trading partners.

Whatever misery they brought to those they purchased and shipped across the Atlantic, European slave traders were welcomed by their African customers. They offered, in return for slaves, a wide range of manufactured goods otherwise unobtainable in West Africa. Both trading partners, African and European, received the commodity they wanted, and made the best bargain they could. Yet, though individual Africans might often outwit their European customers, the overall economic advantage lay with the Europeans. In return for slaves, wealth-creating human machinery, they gave expendable consumer goods, turned out in growing volume by the expanding economy of industrializing Europe.