Muskets and powder: the Atlantic arms trade

What was a trade musket?

A trade musket, or trade gun, was a firearm made to be sold abroad rather than issued to soldiers. Most were flintlocks: long guns lit by a spark from a flint, with a smooth barrel and a wooden stock running almost its whole length. The French word for a light musket was fusil, and light trade guns sold in North America are still often called fusils.

Trade guns were built to a price, and many were poorly made. The historian W. A. Richards found that the cheapest guns got worse when competition was fierce, though he thought their danger had been exaggerated. Historian Priya Satia points out that trade guns wore out quickly, often within a year or so, so buyers kept coming back.

Where were trade guns and gunpowder made?

English trade guns came from workshops in London and Birmingham. Over the 1700s Birmingham, where many small workshops each made one part of a gun, built up a large trade in guns for West Africa, and by the 1770s Bristol’s slave ships bought most of their guns there. Across the sea, gunmakers in Liège, in today’s Belgium, were making trade guns by the late 1600s and sold them through Dutch, French and Portuguese ports. English guns were also sold on through Continental ports.

Gunpowder for trade was coarse and cheap. It was sold by weight and packed in wooden barrels, and it travelled with gunflints and lead shot. Later in the century, gunpowder for Bristol’s slave ships was made in Bristol itself.

Why did West African states buy guns?

African states and merchants bought guns on their own terms. African brokers on the coast bargained for a mix of goods to suit local tastes. Cloth, much of it from India, was the most wanted good almost everywhere, and in Bristol cargoes of the 1770s it made up about a third. Guns, gunpowder and spirits such as brandy were also wanted, though not equally everywhere.

The trade grew fast. By the late 1600s, the historian Ray Kea estimated, well over 2,000 guns a year were landed at Whydah alone, many of them by Dutch and French ships. Historians David Eltis and Lawrence Jennings estimate that West Africa took in about 20,000 guns a year in the 1680s and about 200,000 a year by the 1780s. Richards suggested a much higher figure for the Gold and Slave Coasts by 1730, so the numbers are still argued over.

On the Gold Coast, states such as Akwamu and Akyem bought firelocks (flintlock guns) and powder for their armies. Guns were also symbols of power, used in ceremonies and in diplomacy.

Were guns traded for enslaved people?

Yes, guns and gunpowder were among the goods European traders handed over for captives, a painful part of this story. But historians disagree about how much guns drove the slave trade.

• A strong link. Richards argued that West African warfare was transformed from the 1690s, and that cheaper guns and higher prices for captives helped warlike, slave-exporting states grow. The economist Warren Whatley found in 2017 that British gunpowder imports and slave exports rose and fell together through the 1700s.
• A more complicated picture. Philip Curtin wrote that the “arms for slaves” stereotype does not fit the 1700s. John Thornton argues that African armies were growing for African reasons, and that European weapons did not by themselves cause more wars.

Most agree on this much: guns were never the main good, there was no fixed price of one gun for one person, and African rulers made their own political choices. The people who suffered were the millions of men, women and children captured in wars and raids and carried across the Atlantic.

Why did Native American nations want guns?

In the American Southeast, guns were bought with deerskins. From 1699 to 1715 Charles Town in Carolina shipped out an average of about 54,000 skins a year, and 121,355 in 1707 alone (see hides and deerskins). Native hunters also wanted ammunition, hatchets, knives, cloth and red paint. Muscogee towns, whom the English called Creeks, moved closer to an English trading post opened in 1690.

The guns also fed a trade in Native captives, who were sold as slaves. In 1704 a Carolina force with Creek allies raided the Spanish missions of Florida and carried off about a thousand people. Debts to traders and their abuses helped start the Yamasee War, which began on 15 April 1715 and filled Charles Town with refugees. In 1716 Carolina took the trade into public hands.

Spain’s missions, by contrast, seldom armed their Native converts, leaving them exposed to English-armed raiders.

Why did the Miskito trade for English muskets?

The Miskito lived on the Caribbean coast of today’s Honduras and Nicaragua. Historians trace their trade with the English back to the 1630s: turtle, turtle shell and hides for guns, cloth, rum and beads. The buccaneer William Dampier, writing in 1697 about the 1680s, said Miskito men sailed with English raiders, learned to use guns among them and became fine marksmen, and that they hated the Spanish.

Historians such as Mary Helms describe how English guns made the Miskito powerful: in the late 1600s and early 1700s their raiders struck from the Yucatán to Costa Rica, and many captives were sold to plantations in Jamaica. According to British state papers, on 25 June 1720 Jamaica’s governor, Nicholas Lawes, agreed with the Miskito king the English called Jeremy that fifty Miskito men would help hunt the Maroons, free communities of people who had escaped slavery in Jamaica’s mountains.

What did Spanish law say about selling arms?

Spain did not allow foreign traders into its American colonies without special permission, so a foreign ship selling guns, cloth or anything else on the Spanish Main was smuggling. To stop it, Spain licensed guardacostas, privately crewed ships with royal commissions that kept a share of what they captured. British traders complained that they seized ships on thin evidence, such as Spanish colonial goods or coins found aboard.

Spanish officials were also wary of guns reaching independent Native peoples; a little later, in 1735, a governor of New Mexico banned selling arms to them. “Contraband of war” meant something narrower. Treaties of the time used it for arms, gunpowder and shot that a neutral ship could not carry to an enemy in wartime. In peacetime, guardacostas seized guns as smuggled goods like any others.