There is no doubt that the slave trade was the basic business of the Atlantic trading system from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. Throughout this long period, the selling and buying of human beings, direct producers of goods, determined relations between Senegambia and the European powers. It also determined the nexus of economic, political, and social relationships within the region's various states.

The slave trade and its corollary, warfare between the Senegambian states, were a permanent part of a situation of chronic violence imposed within each state by the existence of a military aristocracy reigning above peasant populations, potential victims of slave raids. Slave trading became a royal monopoly based on violence. As such, it prevented the peasant population working productively under secure conditions.

The result was economic regression. Evidence that this was the state of affairs in all domains can be deduced from the innumerable famines punctuating the history of Senegambia throughout the long slaving era. The famines were caused sometimes by warfare, at other times by natural disasters, the consequences of which aggravated the population drain caused by the massive export of producers as slaves. On the domestic level, the slave trade deepened habits of servility in relationships between free men and slaves. Domestic slavery became an integral complement to the Atlantic slave trade.

In northern Senegambia, royal slaves became instruments serving the arbitrary power of ceddo regimes.