I'm starting here. Where in my argument did I make a "moralistic revision" of history? In fact I stated outright that my viewpoint in this case had nothing to do with morality, and I didn't mention anything similar to "this hurt Africa because it was evil". Where is this coming from?
Not you, the position you are putting forward. Now I am less certain.
I easily wrote four thousand words, bringing up responses to every point you made and even brought in Princeton to say that the population growth of Africa actually increased during the worst of the slave trade. That ranges of total losses to the slave trade traditionally go as low as 7, with outliers saying 5. That same outlier will say 30 or so million on the opposite scale, but depending on which side you want to argue from it is much more complex than that. For instance, by most estimates the total losses in the Belgian Congo were about comparable to the entirety of the slave trade over five centuries. Since you were so careful and keen to preserve that "barely growing population" of the African continent, from this it can easily be argued that the actual damage to the continent is inflated by later European colonial conquests. Further, some people claim over a million Europeans were slaved by North Africans, dwarfing almost any individual tribe or state that suffered from this dark period. That tangent made me uncomfortable, not because it couldn't be argued based from the facts, but because I actually espouse the belief that this was horrible and while the active lessening of the actual consequences could be made, it almost feels like Holocaust denial. So I deleted that and wrote fourteen hundred more.
Africa was not uniformly primitive and the claim that everyone was on the same playing field is patently false at any close regional inspection of the continent. Hell, some historians and scholars wonder if West Africa and the East African Coast should be considered wholly separate from Sub Saharan Africa, or if they should be made into peripheral zones of Islamic and Middle Eastern Civilization, similar to how North Africa and Central Asia were coopted into that category. Many of the states in those regions resembled in some ways Medieval or Reconnaissance States in the process of forming identities that may well have helped bring them closer to Europeans before Europe decided to become hellbent on conquest under the guise of liberation and instilling good old white European values. Elsewhere Pastoralism, Horticulturalism, and even Hunters and Gatherers were the name of the game outside of regions like Ethiopia who had large agricultural networks.
Which leads me to my next, and perhaps most major point. I do not think you really understand the complexities of the African subcontinent. I am still a student to this area of the world, but many of your generalizations seem almost completely unwarranted. Like with your point about agriculture being almost an even playing field, I will talk about your barter and lack of trade parters. Most of these slavers monopolized key points in trade. The Sokoto with the Sahara, Zanzibar with the East Coast and Hinterland, Gold, Ivory, Salt, new Cash crops, new food Crops, native made goods and tools, and so forth flowed through these areas. Trade also was not entirely categorized by barter, as many of these states introduced currencies. Some mixed, others almost entirely based on things the Europeans had no inclination to trade for implying a rich domestic need that was not even remotely supplanted by the Europeans. Cowries were the most common, but there were even fixed sizes of cloth used as currency like in the Congo. I know that you originally brought that up in that the conquest of neighboring people weakened their prospects for Trade, but once closely inspected that is no longer right. In taking over focal points of trade, they opened themselves up to larger numbers of trade partners.
Another point you made was that Africans lost the ability to do work themselves because of the immense wealth coming into the continent from Europe, to the point where it devastated native industries. While many individual trades and productions were lost in different areas, many places kept most of what they had, particularly if they were those powerful slaving empires. After the end of the atlantic slave trade, many shifted gears and allowed for more prominence of agricultural goods and smithed goods for African markets, mostly domestic, but we know for a fact that substantial trade did occur between major states and even major states and little states because of those monopolies. You also seemed to want to make the point that all that immense wealth was actually not all that valuable. A key thing you need to be wary of is general remarks about the slave trade. It was never simple. Multiple nations were involved in the process, and the quality and quantity of goods ranged both within a time and over the course of a few centuries. Towards the end Europeans were stiffing the Africans whenever possible, but even then a substantial number of modern weapons were traded and with the conquests of weapons depots these states were still powerful enough to be able to defeat Europeans. Look to the Ashanti Wars. Britain almost lost West Africa more than once.
Which brings up your other point about them being weak, vulnerable, and susceptible to Europeans. While to a certain extent this is true, the trade with Europeans was profitable and most of their guns were not native born and the ability to produce their own ammunition was limited, traditional African army methods were not lost and were almost always used to augment their current standard. The Ashanti kept a lot of spearmen, the Sokoto a lot of Cavalry of various kinds. So, their traditional ways of warfare were not weakened by this trade at all. They were actually significantly assisted by, you know, the fact that they had firearms now. Which makes the idea that militarily they were weakened seem out of place. Not only were the states much larger and able to field more manpower, they were assisted by powerful technology and a limited ability to manufacture that technology themselves.
Also, building on something else you said, you brought up the Stock Market Crash. The parallel is practically nonsense, a big reason for that would be that four or five powers would need to have doubled in size and tripled in economic growth as the crash was happening. Using that as an example will give you the wrong impression of the slave trade. Especially after you brought up that polygamy was not the right answer. To which I bring up a resounding no for that, in many ways that was the best solution. A married woman or favored concubine was entitled to certain rights, and their children were born free and even capable of inheriting property. The practice dramatically improved the lot of enslaved people. The very young always worked anyways, while the very old were rarely forced to because the slave trade actually saw women gain significant prominence in the actions normally done by men, like back breaking field work. Modern outlook will still condemn that rather harshly, but compared to the Americas it was different. Not to the extent that modern Africans claim in an attempt to absolve themselves from their guilt in the conflict and blame all of the horrors on their later conquerors, but a considerable extent nonetheless.
Now onto more falsehoods. None of the states I mentioned failed miserably when the Atlantic Slave Trade ended. Ethiopia did not fail when the slave trade ended, they failed when Mussolini gassed, artilliaried, and bombed the country into submission. The Ashanti did not fail when the slave trade in the Altantic ended, they failed when the British fought four wars to beat them into submission with a massive alliance of forces, including other African forces, along with Maxim Guns. The Sokoto failed likewise, but was powerful enough to ensure that they retained a sort of almost-autonomous rule under their Sultan.
While I could go on, like in one area where you contradicted yourself by asking where technology improved in Africa after mentioning a big area that illustrates such advancement, I would just like to bring up that you started this by responding to me and my point about how some states benefited from the slave trade, while the entire continent as a whole suffered. You did this by A) most of the time old weapons were traded, something only true in the later stages of the trade; B) that the trade was so wealthy no industry survived and was supplanted by the west, a complete fiction if there ever was one; and C) depopulation was immense and led to the depopulation of Africans in the "region", to which I brought up that depopulation was only of the victims and the slavers themselves had population booms which added further incentive to conquer and enslave. This, in turn, was in response to someone else who said that no state every benefited from the trade with Europeans, which I responded to because it is normally of modern revisioning to history. Like how the role and extent of Fascism in France during and before the second world war is practically whitewashed, or the fabrication of the noble savage who was in tune with nature and peaceful with all things until the white man showed up. Or even the proliferation of downright propaganda as fact in some historical records, like the Romans, Greeks, and Chinese. Things like that annoy me because they serve to masque the truth for political or ideological advancement.
The truth is that the African Slave in the Atlantic was a den of horrors, but it was a partnership in crime through in which many African states benefited immensely. Further, these states were not nearly as dependent as many have claimed, and were thriving well after the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, in part because of their own native industry and the fact that African Slavery was a fundamental part of their civilization, like in the Antiquity of Europe. The loss of their Atlantic outlet, something that had been in declining significance for over a century before its removal, was not all that terminal in the grand scheme of things. Almost all of them fell because Europeans far outpaced their own modest thrusts into modernity and they turned all that focus in destroying them, or subjugating them in the great game of colonialism in Africa. If you agree with this, then there is no issue or cause for further debate.
If you disagree and think I am wrong, please by all means continue and show me why.