West Africans traded widely internally before French rule.

Evidence

Exchange was widespread within West Africa before the arrival of the French; as the economic historian Anthony Hopkins has shown, most households regarded trade as a normal and integral part of their activities. … Long-distance trade specialized in luxury items such as slaves, kola nuts, and salt. External trade was of course also well established by the end of the nineteenth century; indeed, after the demise of the European and American slave markets in the 185o’s, and with the onset of industrialization in Europe, a veritable “trade revolution” had taken place in West Africa. At that time, local farmers began to specialize in, and export in ever-increasing quantities, oleaginous products demanded by Europe’s burgeoning industrial sector. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 113

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to other scholarship on precolonial African trade: Rodney’s ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ and the debate over Hopkins’ ‘An Economic History of West Africa’.
• SEED: The ‘trade revolution’ that reoriented West African export agriculture anticipates the forced-cash-crop era France later imposed — an angle on how pre-existing market integration was redirected rather than created.