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  • The Liverpool of West Africa: The Dynamics and Impact of Maritime Trade in Lagos 1900–1950
  • Stephanie Decker
Ayodeji Olukoju. The Liverpool of West Africa: The Dynamics and Impact of Maritime Trade in Lagos 1900–1950. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2004. xiv + 265 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper.

This is a study of the economic history of Lagos, a subject that has not received sufficient attention since Anthony Hopkins wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the topic in 1964. The strength of Ayodeji Olukoju’s contribution lies in the meticulous archival research into the minutiae of colonial policymaking in a highly dependent economy. Yet there are a number of problems with this book.

The first one is its title: why is Lagos “the Liverpool of West Africa”? As someone who knows both cities, I see few similarities between the energetic and extreme Third World metropolis and the somewhat sleepy provincial backwater with an incurable soccer obsession. Despite several references in the book, the analogy remains unclear. At the beginning, Olukoju points out that Lagos was Liverpool’s complement in the slave trade—yet he also states that this trade had ceased before 1900, when the story of the book [End Page 140] begins. At one point he cites the proclivity of workers to go on strike in Lagos, which gave it the reputation of being “a Liverpool”; this seems an apt but not entirely sufficient explanation. More confusingly, he considers a reference to the unsanitary housing conditions in Lagos in a newspaper article entitled “Lagos, the Liverpool of West Africa,” as ironic—yet surely Liverpool’s living conditions in the nineteenth century were known to be among the most appalling anywhere in Britain. Indeed this is probably one of the strongest connections between the two cities. It is in the last pages that he clarifies that it was the magnitude of maritime trade that made Lagos resemble Liverpool. This seems to overlook the fact that Liverpool was the main gateway to West Africa beyond the slave trade until the rise of air travel in the 1960s, with most goods and people going to and from the U.K. to West Africa via Lagos and Liverpool. Yet without any clear comparison between the two cities, putting Liverpool in the title of a book on Lagos seems more confusing than helpful.

For a book on economic history, there is very little economic analysis. Global economic trends affect Lagos like the weather, and although the book is strong on commodity issues, it remains highly descriptive. One example is the theme of backward-bending supply curves, which crops up in some places without ever being referred to by this term. The author cites both evidence for and against the existence of this problem of supply and consumption without resolving or explaining how this is possible.

Finally, the structure of the book is not immediately apparent. Chapters mostly follow chronologically, and the book overall reads like a continuous narrative based on archival research. The conclusion is very short and seems to belong to a different study: one on the role of domestic and expatriate entrepreneurship in Nigeria—a subject that does come up yet hardly dominates the narrative, which is based on administrative records and therefore focuses mostly on issues of economic policy. Here the author argues that above and beyond the failings of Nigerian firms, expatriate businesses had a distinct advantage in the consistent support they received from the colonial government. This is mostly true. However, Olukoju’s narrative supports the view that colonial government and imperial business constituted two separate interest groups, which were nevertheless much closer than the often marginalized indigenous entrepreneurs. More important, the author implies that Nigeria’s banks are still expatriate companies—although the Nigerian state took an increasing share of equity from Barclays, Standard Chartered, and the British & French Bank since the 1970s. Renaming those banks Union Bank, First Bank, and United Bank of Africa (UBA), respectively, was more than just cosmetic; the former owners divested their minority stock in the 1980s. Nowadays, they are run by Nigerian entrepreneurs, among them the Harvard Business School graduate Hakeem Belo-Osagie at UBA.

Stephanie...

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