me phase of economic activity made it necessary that they maintain commercial contact with other communities and countries in order to secure the things that they did not produce (Hope 16). Some villages, for example, specialized in fishing, others concentrated on metallurgy, while others made weapons, utensils, and so on. Traders traveled from place to place to barter and to purchase. Upon returning they were laden with goods that they sold within their own community (Hope 17). As the Atlantic route expanded, accounting for nearly two thirds of all Africans leaving the continent, it created systems for the gruesome work of collecting and exporting slaves and brought the expansion of a system of slavery in Africa itself. The rising prices for slaves, steadily driven by increasing American demand, powerfully influenced local African developments where slave trade was well established. For example, in some cases such as Kingdom of the Kongo to the south of the Zaire or Congo River, slave trade was quickly organized from a region that had only limited slavery and became a steady exporter of slaves (Klein 58). Large-scale warfare, in which obtaining slaves for the Atlantic trade was a major theme, became more common. The effects of slave trade soon led to civil wars, kidnappings, and disruptions, which brought about the decline of the existing kingdoms on the one had and the rise of new but smaller ones on the other. Entire trading networks became intimately tied to the supply of slaves to the Atlantic economy. Certain regions found slave trade so attractive that they have up their interests in gold mining and trading goods, and turned to the profitable business of capturing and exporting of slaves. Agriculture also suffered as a result of the expansion of the slave trade. Various viable agricultural lands in the interior of many of the exporting regions in Africa were abandoned for the sake of a more profitable businessAs the res...
