By Lawal Musa
February 13, 2026
The rise of modern Europe cannot be fully understood without confronting an uncomfortable truth: Africa was a central pillar of European economic expansion. Long before factories roared and railways crisscrossed the continent, the wealth that financed industrial growth was extracted from African bodies and lands through slavery and colonial exploitation. The transatlantic slave trade was not a peripheral tragedy; it was a core economic engine that powered Western modernity.
Classical economists acknowledged this reality, even when they failed to challenge its moral foundations forcefully. Adam Smith, writing in The Wealth of Nations (1776), recognized that colonial plantation systems generated extraordinary profits for European powers. Sugar, cotton, tobacco, and indigo—cultivated by enslaved Africans in the Americas—fed European markets and accumulated capital at an unprecedented scale. This surplus wealth flowed into banks, ports, insurance firms, and manufacturing centers, especially in Britain, laying the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution.
Historians have since demonstrated that this relationship was structural, not incidental. Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), argued persuasively that profits from slavery and the slave trade were decisive in financing Britain’s industrial takeoff. According to Williams, the decline of slavery occurred not primarily because of moral awakening, but because industrial capitalism had found new, more profitable forms of exploitation. Slavery had already fulfilled its economic function.
African-centered scholarship deepens this analysis. Walter Rodney asserted that Europe’s development and Africa’s underdevelopment were inseparable processes. Africa lost millions of its most productive men and women to slavery, while Europe gained cheap labor, raw materials, and captive markets. This unequal exchange locked Africa into a position of dependency that persisted long after the formal end of slavery.
The industrial cities of Europe textile hubs, shipbuilding ports, and financial centers—were inseparable from the Atlantic economic system. Cotton mills relied on slave-grown cotton; shipping companies transported slave-produced commodities; banks and insurers financed voyages that treated Africans as cargo. As Karl Marx famously observed, capitalism emerged “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Europe’s factories stood on foundations laid by colonial violence.
Abolition did not dismantle exploitation; it transformed it. Slavery gave way to colonial rule, which reorganized African economies to serve European industrial needs. Raw materials flowed outward, manufactured goods flowed inward, and political control enforced economic submission. When formal colonialism ended, neo-colonial mechanisms—unequal trade, debt dependency, and foreign corporate dominance—maintained the same hierarchy.
The legacy of this history remains visible today. Many African economies struggle with structural weaknesses rooted in centuries of extraction, while Europe’s prosperity is often portrayed as the product of innovation alone. Frantz Fanon warned that colonialism did not only steal wealth; it shattered social structures, confidence, and the capacity for independent development.
Recognizing Africa as Europe’s economic backbone is not about assigning eternal guilt, but about restoring historical truth. Without this acknowledgment, global inequality appears natural rather than manufactured. Europe’s industrial triumph was not achieved in isolation—it was built, in significant measure, on African labor, African suffering, and African sacrifice.
Abuja Network News
Tags
Opinion