Nineteenth-century ‘trade guns’ in the Congo Estuary: Local refractions of a global trade

Abstract Throughout the nineteenth century, African communities in the Congo estuary displayed a consistent preference for ‘trade guns’, the rough-and-ready muzzle-loading muskets that European producers and traders regarded as obsolete and as an indirect proof of African backwardness. The first section of this article seeks to account for this consumer predilection. The second and third substantive parts of the article explore the provenance of these guns and argue that the lower Congo’s gun trade can be disaggregated into three phases, each of which was marked by the local ascendancy of different trading houses. The most general aim of the article is to make a case for the role of African consumer demand in fostering processes of global economic integration. More specifically, by showing that west-central African demand was responsible for the enduring vitality of Liège’s non-mechanised cottage industry, the article points to an often-overlooked aspect of nineteenth-century globalisation: far from invariably promoting innovation in industrialisation, the growing interdependence of different parts of the world could also have the effect of giving a new lease of life to apparently antiquated manufacturing methods.