European slave demand itself intensified African intertribal warfare for profit.

Evidence

Sylviane Diouf’s work examines the various means by which Africans became enslaved. While some were kidnapped by slave traders, most Africans were enslaved as a result of conflicts between African tribes wherein the winners took the losing tribes’ members as captives. Some kept them as their own slaves, while others sold the captives to European transatlantic slave traders. Muslim captives were no exception. As the demand for slaves by Europeans increased, so too did the profitability of selling war captives into the transatlantic slave trade. Armed conflicts in West Africa eventually supplied the largest number of enslaved Africans to the New World. Indeed, some conflicts were driven purely by the economic incentive to capture and enslave large numbers of people, bringing an African tribal ruler the latest weapons from Europe and large sums of money. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 567

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The passage shows European demand for slaves causally driving African rulers to wage predatory wars for profit — an uncomfortable feedback loop where enslaved Muslims were captured partly by fellow Muslims, complicating simple ‘Europe vs. Africa’ slave trade narratives.
• XREF: Connects to broader literature on how external demand reshapes internal conflict incentives (cf. conflict economics, resource curse work).
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘Who captured the captured?’ — the internal African supply side of the slave trade and how European demand perverted local conflict dynamics.