The early eighteenth-century traveller and writer Francis Moore commented enthusiastically about the village organisation of the Pholey people living in the Gambian inland of West Africa. ‘They are very industrious and frugal’, Moore wrote of this tribe, ‘and raise much more Corn and Cotton than they consume, which they sell at reasonable Rates’. He had no doubt that they were ‘the greatest Planters in the Country’. To the eyes of an eighteenth-century European, they approximated civility as, he explained, ‘their towns are surrounded with palisadoes, within which they have plantations of cotton, and on the outside of this fence they sow their Indian corn’ (Figure 9.1). Moore's cotton and corn plantations were not organised on slave labour. Quite the opposite: the Pholey town and plantation represent an idealised vision of cotton cultivation in uncontaminated Africa. Moore continued by explaining that their ‘kindness’ was such that ‘if they know of one of them made a Slave, all the Pholeys will redeem him’. The image of a plantation economy served to represent the virtue of a perfectly organised community able to redeem its members even from slavery.

This chapter starts with an idealised opposite of what cotton production had become already by the time when, in 1738, Moore published the first edition of his Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa. Readers would have not failed to notice the irony of Moore's description of free Africans cultivating cotton to be sold to Europeans. An increasing share of the world's cotton was cultivated in the Americas by African slaves rather than in Africa by free labour. Yet, this image allows us to ask why this was the case: why was the raw cotton used for the production of textiles in Europe produced by slave labour, and why did it come from the Americas? Was it not possible for cotton to be cultivated in Africa in exchange for foreign goods? This chapter considers how plantations came into existence and why by the eighteenth century the needs of Europeans were starting to have ecologic, commercial and economic repercussions worldwide.