That there was a complex historical relationship between the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and legitimate commerce has been widely and lengthily debated among Africanists and others. The debate is virtually contemporaneous with the abolition of the external slave trade itself. A fundamental issue has been to determine the precise nature of the impact of abolition on West African social and political formations. According to Tony Hopkins, the European powers' decision to abolish the external slave trade created for West Africa ‘the problem of developing alternative exports’. He continues: ‘The outcome was a period of transition and experimentation, which is customarily referred to as the era of “legitimate commerce” in order to distinguish it from the illegal trade in slaves'. Hopkins argued that ‘the structure of legitimate trade marked an important break with the past and signified a new phase in the growth of the market, a phase which can be seen as the start of the modern economic history of West Africa’, and constituted a ‘crisis of adaptation’. Others have interpreted the commercial transition in less sweeping terms, suggesting that there was no decisive rupture with the past, and hence by implication no ‘crisis of adaptation’.

Immanuel Wallerstein, too, sees a continuity. His historical context is an expanding capitalist world-system and the (structural) incorporation of West Africa into it.