In her 2004 book, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Century, Ghanaian scholar Akosua Perbi argues that the precolonial economy in Ghana was “almost totally dependent on slave labour” (110). People became enslaved through intertribal warfare, and enslaved people were viewed as heritable commodities, just as they would later be in the race-based system of slavery in Europe and the Americas. Perbi argues that practices of enslavement in West Africa began in the Neolithic and Iron Ages, dating to thousands of years BCE, and that these practices became increasingly institutionalized in the early Middle Ages as precolonial West African states solidified.

As Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonists arrived in West Africa, slavery became a globe-spanning industry, and the demand for enslaved Africans grew exponentially. Far more Ghanaians were enslaved in this era than ever before, and Ghanaian ruling classes, with the help of their European colonizers, built castles and dungeons along the coast where enslaved people were kept in horrific conditions before being shipped across the Atlantic. Many of these edifices are still in use as market halls and governmental offices today. This new form of slavery was both far larger in scale and far crueler than precolonial slavery had been.