How was the continent of Africa enslaved from the 15th to 19th century? Was it because the technology of the Europeans was that much better for them to be able to do that?

Question

How was the continent of Africa enslaved from the 15th to 19th century? Was it because the technology of the Europeans was that much better for them to be able to do that?

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Answer 1

Slavery was a thriving business in Africa long before the Europeans arrived. The Europeans were just new and lucrative customers of the slave trade. They did make it worse to an extent because they would also trade guns for slaves, which would allow tribes to capture more slaves to sell.

Some parts of Africa were colonized, mainly near the coasts. This isn’t only due to the Europeans having better technology, but because Africa was often a bunch of tribes that already often warred with each other. So it’s not like the Dutch arrived in South Africa and met unified resistance from all of the inhabitants.

However, sometimes the Europeans ran up against large kingdoms, and often in those cases they preferred to set up trade. The Italians tried colonizing Ethiopia in the late 1800s, and the kingdom drove them out. Mussolini succeeded in the mid 1900s, but it only lasted five years when international support for his colonization dried up with his entry into WWII.