In this book, A. G. Hopkins seeks to redirect economic history from development and dependency theorizations and other analytical tools that privilege the paramountcy of the state but silence entrepreneurship. He argues that these are distractions which despite their loud claims have not solved the problems of poverty in Africa. Capitalism, after all, is most evident in the innovativeness of individuals and entrepreneurs who generate wealth through risk-taking, who take advantage of opportunities for profit making, and who challenge conventions and thereby advance society.

Hopkins wondered why, since his landmark An Economic History of West Africa (1973), historians have largely neglected entrepreneurs as agents in the making of modern Africa.Footnote ¹ This is despite the foundational roles of merchant capitalists in economic transformation, colonial expansion, land tenure, property, credit expansion, inventions of tradition, and elite culture—factors that have become the canons of West African history. Specifically, regarding Lagos, there is no shortage of data for the recovery of the history of entrepreneurship. Rather, scholars appear to be distracted by the enduring power of Eurocentrism. This informs approaches which treat port cities like Lagos quintessentially as the product of European travels, technology and colonialism (10), histories of capitalism that ascribes innovation, profit-making and risk-taking, and uncertainty as European characteristics (which Africans are assumedly culturally unequipped for) (18), and the inordinate focus of development theorists on the state as engine of economic growth. These factors, Hopkins argues, have distracted from the long history of individual innovativeness and free enterprise.

Hopkins’s merchant capitalists of Lagos emerged from the shock of the British bombardment of 1851 which swept away old slave merchants and militaristic rulers and replaced them with (predominantly) a new generation of educated African immigrants with a “mission in spreading beneficial forms of commerce and improving values to Africa” (22). By the 1890s, this merchant tradition produced colonial enterpreneurs advancing the cause of British colonialism, serving as commercial agents and intermediaries for British (and other Atlantic) businesses, and thereby transforming or modernizing land tenure, housing and infrastructure, bulk and retail, transportation, currency and credit, taxation, and probate and law. The system they created survived colonialism and other external frictions, and it endures in how the economy of Lagos and Nigeria operates today.

The capitalists include merchant princes like James Davies and Zachariah Williams. All former slaves (or children of slaves) and creoles (Saro). They exemplify British commercial, evangelical, and colonial visions as intermediaries of British commerce and culture. Hopkins demonstrates that they were more than colonial agents and may have shaped Britain’s colonial objectives as much as any imperial purposes set for them. Their commercial forays into the Yoruba country up to the Niger often forced British intervention, just as they influenced commercial law and intergovernmental relations across the region. While the Saros are well reported in the literature, Hopkins successfully brings them into conversation with contemporaneous native “big men” like Oshodi Tapa, Mohammed Shitta Bey, and Alli Balogun. These figures were often Muslims and traditionalists, connected to the pre-1851 militaristic and slave-trading elite, and retained vast commercial and political power, sometimes well beyond Lagos. Like the Saro, they navigated economic and political shocks by adopting and adapting to changes, by reinterpreting traditional land tenure, inheritance, credit, and so on, in the light of new Atlantic influences. Far from a binary in which big men contrast with the Saro, they all intermingled, competed, and collaborated with each other.

Capitalism in the Colonies stands as a scholarly landmark for far more than its wealth of data generated over Hopkins’s long and distinguished career. Historians of Lagos and Nigeria will find much information that can connect dots about elite politics, property, and inheritance, as well as about iconic buildings, street names, and other lore and legends that are woven into popular conceptions of Lagos life and society. The author’s objective is well achieved through narratives that demonstrate that Lagos was built not through a development paradigm, but from the everyday ambitions and innovativeness of enterprising individuals as they interacted and competed over production and commerce, distribution, transportation and travel, and the dynamic sociopolitical changes thereby engendered. Through their biographies, Hopkins provides insightful explanations into the short lives of African businesses and demonstrates why only a few businesses survived the life span of their primogenitor.

How much does Lagos provide a template for an African history of entrepreneurial capitalism or of a port city in the making of modern Africa? Lagos is unique as a sheltered harbor but is also typical of West African ports in how it served large producing areas in the hinterland. Hopkins’s reliance on mostly British records certainly approves a neat narrative of a British transport revolution which carried steamships across the world, expanded commerce, demanded larger harbors, nurtured capitalists, necessitated colonial expansion, and launched the transformation of native societies towards the modern. Indeed, despite Hopkins’s apparent self-awareness and sensitivity to more nationalistic perspectives, this book does not escape the dualism of British and African ways. Reproducing Richard Burton’s description of Lagos as “detestable, squalid and dirty” (14) to highlight the impacts of merchant capitalism in transforming the city to the “Liverpool of British West Africa” (15) reignites the tropes of British imperial historiography. Some will contest that Lagos became any less squalid and dirty under British colonialism or that Liverpool and London were contemporarily much less so.

What the book accidentally does is situate colonialism more contextually beyond British power. By highlighting the energy, dynamism, and innovation by which Lagos grew, it becomes clear that so much more was going on than British ideas and power. The attributes of entrepreneurs can be seen as human traits rather than racial or cultural characteristics. British colonial power comes across as limited and as a tool that competing elites and merchants bent to their purposes. Beyond its colony and “new town,” a narrow strip of land of less than one mile, bounded by Broad Street before Olowogbowo (58)—where British administrators dispensed titles and crown grants and where British firms could manage credit and distribution—political power remained in the hands of chiefly elites who competed to bend British power and resources towards their purpose. As Daniel Taiwo’s career and influence shows, relations were mutual, with intrigues, collaboration, bribery, treachery, and rivalry, on and by all sides. British officials like John Hawley Glover and Knapp Barrow associated with local chiefs to burnish their careers, negotiate with other Africans, and secure their own holdings (129). Sometimes they secured approval from Whitehall for their projects and at other times failed depending on the ideological influence that controlled Britain’s imperial policymaking (183). Capitalists like Taiwo were more than colonial creations, agents, or victims. They infiltrated the colony, received privileged information from the government, greased a few palms, and wrote “begging letters, supplicatory addresses” as was necessary (130).

It is also impossible to miss the claims of privilege and use of titles which were beyond British comprehension. Seeing British respect for titles and nobility, individuals like Shitta Bey obtained and presented an Ottoman Bey-ship. Another claimed to be the Are Kakanfo of Abeokuta (130), an Oyo war title unlikely to have formally existed in mid-century Abeokuta. Clearly, capable individuals invented and appropriated the symbolism of titles whether they were plausibly traditional or modern. Overall, contrary to the notion that merchant capitalists were agents of British ideas of progress, they often operated despite it.

These are a few points and issues that Capitalism in the Colonies reignites and will intensify going forward. Hopkins commendably unearths such rich data that has skipped the attention of many Africanists, but his interpretation of them comes further along in the historiographical debates since the 1960s. One cannot but wonder how critical nationalists like E. A. Ayandele, Marxists like Olusegun Osoba and Julius Ihonvbere, and Olufemi Taiwo of the more recent decolonization of invented knowledges, would have responded to this framework.Footnote ² Long may productive debates continue.