This essay examines the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on stateless societies, focusing on Balanta populations of present-day Guinea-Bissau. It demonstrates that some decentralized groups located on the ‘slaving frontiers’ of states managed not only to survive but also to thrive. In so doing, it shows how Balanta changed their settlement patterns and crop production techniques in response to threats posed by the slave raiding armies of Kaabu. From the mid-seventeenth century, Balanta produced and traded large quantities of paddy rice by organizing workers into age grades.

The region of Souroudougou played a dynamic role in the regional slave trade of the western Niger Bend during the nineteenth century, supplying slaves to neighboring states. A number of mechanisms, termed here ‘indirect linkages’, connected sources of slaves in Souroudougou to the broader regional slave trade. These took the form of commercial activity by Muslim mercantile groups, banditry and alliances formed between neighboring states and local power brokers in Souroudougou. At the same time, the growing slave trade triggered important internal processes of change in the local social landscape, termed here the ‘espace de compétition’. In particular, heightened individual and group competition transformed established codes of behavior and social networks.

This article, based on a review of the relevant literature, argues that the analyses of Andrew Hubbell and Walter Hawthorne can be extended to a general interpretation of the impact of the slave trade on decentralized societies. First, decentralized societies usually defended themselves effectively, forcing slavers both to extend their networks further into the interior and to devise new ways of obtaining slaves. Second, agents of the slave trade were often successful in developing linkages within targeted societies that exploited tensions and hostilities within them. In the process, the prey often became predators, but predators that captured people like themselves.

The use of people as pawns to underpin credit was widespread in western Africa during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This study examines where and when pawns were used in commercial transactions involving European slave merchants in the period c. 1600–1810. It is shown that European merchants relied on pawnship as an instrument of credit protection in many places, though not everywhere. Europeans apparently did not hold pawns at Ouidah (after 1727), at Bonny or on the Angolan coast. Nonetheless, the reliance on pawnship elsewhere highlights the influence of African institutions on the development of the slave trade.

Census and other demographic data are used to estimate the volume of the illegal slave trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles from Madagascar and the East African coast between 1811 and c. 1827. The structure and dynamics of this illicit traffic, as well as governmental attempts to suppress it, are also discussed. The Mauritian and Seychellois trade is revealed to have played a greater role in shaping Anglo-Merina and Anglo-Omani relations between 1816 and the early 1820s than previously supposed. Domestic economic considerations, together with British pressure on the trade's sources of supply, contributed to its demise.