The stakes

The amount of gum that British, Dutch and French ships brought to Europe increased from an average of five hundred to a thousand tons a year in the eighteenth century, to two thousand tons a year in the nineteenth. Economists in Britain and France hoped that a monopoly in the gum trade for their nation would not only encourage their own manufacturers, but also ruin those of their enemy. It has been argued that the wish to secure access to the West African places where gum Arabic was traded was the immediate cause of the Seven Years War, which France and Britain waged over pre-colonial markets on both sides of the Atlantic from 1756 to1763. In fact, the competitors spent more than three-quarters of that century on ‘gum wars’ that were fought with frigates, canons and intrigue, and with the active involvement of the Sahelian emirate of Trarza, whose power was also at stake. One way of telling the story is to zoom in on some of the main characters, the French Compagnie director Andre Brue, the American-British merchant Thomas Cumming, and the successive Trarza emirs who dealt with them: A῾li Shanzura (ruled 1703-1727), his son A῾mar b. A῾li Shanzura (ruled 1727-1757) and his nephew, A῾li Kuri (ruled 1771-1786).

Most of the victims in the gum wars did not fall in battles between European powers but died from dehydration or drowning or were killed by the lances and assegais of inhabitants of the Sahel. In spite of the victims, however, these wars have been forgotten. One of the reasons is that later historians of European-African relations in the region have been more interested in the trade in slaves across the Atlantic Ocean. If the entire coast of West Africa, from Mauritania to Gambia, is taken into account, slaves were indeed the most important ‘commodity’ in the eighteenth century. Around 1780, European vessels carried some twenty thousand slaves from Senegambia to American colonies every year. Between eight hundred and one thousand of these came via Saint Louis. Between Cap Blanc and Cap Verde (including Saint Louis), however, and in the region along the river Senegal the trade in gum Arabic seems to have been of greater importance in terms of the immediate financial transactions involved, and this importance only grew.