markellion's video: British abolition - the slave trade from an economic perspective

Through abolitionism the British virtually became masters (even more than they already were!) of the slave trade, the bellow example is how British merchandise became a necessity to carry on the slave trade. The British gained even more control by moving the direction of the slave trade to the Eastern coast, where it was carried on entirely with British capital! Making it illegal raised the prices that the French, Portuguese ect. were willing to pay for slaves. In this way there would be greater returns for the goods that British shipping brought in to carry on the slave trade. The African wars could not be instigated without specific merchandise that the British could provide The bellow author admits to the supreme importance of British capital "It is clear as the sun at noonday that all this is the direct fruit of the employment of British capital in the felonious trade" http://books.google.com/books?id=A23WAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA294&dq=t =onepage&q=&f=false "The Consul at Zanzibar may easily prove that a Banian house there, itself a branch of another great house at Bombay, and both of them of the very highest commercial character, fitted out a caravan for a most respectable Arab merchant, with the cloths of Hamburg, or the beads and wire of England and America, to go into the interior and trade for ivory.... ...the Arab re-appears; slaves in numbers, as well as ivory, arrive ; who are sold for the mainland, whilst some go to Zanzibar, some to Arabia. It is clear as the sun at noonday that all this is the direct fruit of the employment of British capital in the felonious trade" Using Dahomey as an example, this manipulation was to switch from Asian to European merchandise http://stmarys.ca/~wmills/course316/7Dahomey.html "Economy - Dahomey had a monetary system: cowry shells were the basic currency, but trade goods were used also—guns, bolts of cloth etc. - Europeans tried to take advantage of this currency; they brought so many cowry shells that the shells lost value (inflation). As a result, European trade goods became the basic currency used in the purchase of slaves." "The British East India Company — the Company that Owned a Nation (or Two)" George P. Landow, Professor of English and the History of Art, Brown University http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/india/eic.html "The company's encounters with foreign competitors eventually required it to assemble its own military and administrative departments, thereby becoming an imperial power in its own right, though the British government began to reign it in by the late eighteenth century. Before Parliament created a government-controlled policy-making body with the Regulating Act of 1773 and the India Act eleven years later, shareholders' meetings made decisions about Britain's de facto colonies in the East. The British government took away the Company's monopoly in 1813, and after 1834 it worked as the government's agency until the 1857 India Mutiny when the Colonial Office took full control. The East India Company went out of existence in 1873. During its heyday, the East India Company not only established trade through Asia and the Middle East but also effectively became of the ruler of territories vastly larger than the United Kingdrom itself. In addition, it also created, rather than conquered, colonies. Singapore, for example, was an island with very few Malay inhabitants in 1819 when Sir Stamford Raffles purchased it for the Company from their ruler, the Sultan of Johor, and created what eventually became one of the world's greatest trans-shipment ports."