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Introduction
- Indiana University Press
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Introduction This book investigates the relationship between long-term changes in the economy and culture of the Atlantic world and the history of a small but globally significant portion of the West African coast. The slave trade, which in the roughly 350 years of its existence forcibly exported approximately 12.4 million Africans to the Americas to provide labor for the development of plantation societies there, first brought the West and the territory the world now knows as Lagos into steady and intimate contact with one another.1 Yet soon after the commerce took root at Lagos in the late eighteenth century, a great shift in moral consciousness in the West led Britain, then the dominant power in the Atlantic world, to reconceptualize Europe’s relationship with Africa and resolve to abolish the trade in human beings in the Bight of Benin, where Lagos is located, and elsewhere.2 By the time the slave trade finally ended at Lagos in the midnineteenth century, a new and, in the minds of many Europeans, revolutionary type of commerce had emerged to take its place. The commodity traded was now no longer human beings, but rather a mundane vegetable oil derived from palm fruit that grew wild in the interior of the West African coast, for which industrialization and urbanization were creating new uses in Europe. That many in Britain believed this new trade was necessary to abolition and, with its handmaiden Christianity, had the power to reform Africa and save her peoples at once from the sins of the slave trade and their own simple shortcomings reveals much about the early-Victorian worldview. Policymakers in Britain thought, moreover, 2 / Slavery and the Birth of an African City that the trade played an important part in the vigorous expansion of their country’s commerce overseas, which they saw as vital to its prosperity, stability , and continued march toward power and progress.3 These two articles of faith combined in the mid-nineteenth century to lead Britain to conquer and colonize the area. In the time between Lagos’s rise to preeminence as a slave port, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and 1960, when it became the capital of black Africa’s largest and most powerful new nation, Nigeria, the settlement on the West African coast was transformed from a crossroads of regional trade and the village capital of a small and comparatively insigni ficant kingdom into one of Africa’s most important cities. The momentous birth of this now vast metropolis, which shaped the lives of its inhabitants for decades to come, can be traced to the time of slavery and abolition. To start with a discussion of Atlantic influences is not to imply that the people who inhabited Lagos and, indeed, the wider region where it is located were passive subjects in history’s unfolding. Nor is it to accept that external forces have been more important than internal ones in shaping their past. It is merely to acknowledge that global, as well as local and regional , processes of change affected their opportunities and helped create the conditions in which they acted.4 More than a half century of scholarship has demonstrated that Africa had a history prior to European colonization and that even in the most unequal and oppressive environments after it, the continent’s peoples have shaped the world in which they lived.5 As a work of African history, this book is primarily concerned with the African side of the story. It seeks to understand how the inhabitants of Lagos and, to a lesser extent, the wider region shaped the Atlantic encounter in the eras of slavery and abolition, as well as how they were affected by it. The study probes the engagement of local peoples, and of the social structures, economic arrangements, political institutions, and cultural values that gave form and meaning to their lives, with shifting external opportunities and constraints. In the process, it uncovers how the world Lagosians inhabited changed as the settlement developed into a center of Atlantic commerce, first in slaves and then in palm produce, and finally into a British imperial capital. Changes in the meaning and value of people lie at the heart of the story. It is by now well understood that in much of precolonial Africa wealth and power were rooted not in ownership of land but in control of people. As settlements grew and developed along the Bight of Benin and in its interior...