West African rulers expanded enslavable crimes to profit from the transatlantic trade

Evidence

As the transatlantic slave trade expanded and became more profitable, enslavement became a common form of punishment for crimes. Now enslaved, African convicts could be sold to the Europeans. Seeking to generate more funds, guns, or other goods offered in exchange for slaves, African rulers expanded the categories of crimes punishable by enslavement, including debtors unable to repay their creditors. Famine was another driver in the local slave trade. Some people pawned themselves into slavery to wealthy Africans in order to have enough to eat, only to later be sold to the Europeans because their African slave owners could no longer afford to feed them, among other reasons. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 569

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the themes in ‘On Sacrifice’ about stratified societies and coerced labor, and to the general literature on African complicity in the slave trade (e.g., Thornton’s ‘Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World’).
• SEED: An angle on how local African legal systems and famine dynamics, not just European demand, structured who ended up enslaved — the legal architecture behind forced migration.