"The Cost of Doing Business? Americans Reckon with East Africa Slavery"

By the mid-nineteenth century, New England merchants had established an expansive trade route connecting half a dozen ports in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Headquartered on the island of Zanzibar, Americans imported a range of commodities, including cotton cloth, gunpowder, and muskets. The outbreak of the Civil War gutted this trade, which fell from a million dollars per year to almost nothing by 1862. As business gradually rebounded after the war, American merchants and diplomats faced a different challenge: how to square their country’s newfound commitment to free labor with the region’s rapidly expanding slave economy. Although this tension had become more pressing, it was not entirely new. For decades, American merchants had harshly critiqued the foreign society around them, including limited criticism of the East African slave trade. As early ventures proved lucrative, profit margins had quickly overshadowed moral qualms and Americans accepted the status quo, relying on enslaved laborers for their daily operations. As the trade matured, however, American commodities and consumption contributed significantly to the expansion of the East African slave trade. Swahili caravans into the interior exchanged American cloth directly for enslaved people who carried ivory tusks back to the coastline, destined for combs, pianos keys, and billiard balls in upper-class American households. While American consuls periodically echoed their government’s prevailing anti-slavery sentiments, they reacted fiercely to any threats to their commercial interests. As British efforts to curtail the regional slave trade increased, American merchants did their best to undermine them, viewing them as a cynical ploy to break into their commercial territory.