In Capitalism in the Colonies, A.G. Hopkins returns to a topic he first set out to study in the 1960s but at that time shelved for fear of insufficient source material: the spread of capitalism in West Africa as seen from the activities of the African entrepreneurs of Lagos in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

His central protagonists are successful Saro merchants, a community with Yoruba roots but a circuitous route to Lagos. In the nineteenth century, thousands of enslaved Yoruba men and women on slave ships intercepted by the British were resettled in and around Freetown. There, many gained a mission school education, converted to Christianity, learned English, and adopted an Anglophone name. Some of these settlers or their children later returned to Yorubaland and many settled in Lagos after the British bombardment of 1851. This small community held outsized importance in the early days of the Lagos colony. They were disproportionately represented in the colonial service and clergy and active advocates of abolition.

From this community emerged a business elite, the most successful of whom became known locally as the merchant princes, and included the likes of James Davies, Jacob Coker, Richard Blaize, and Josiah Doherty. They straddled African and colonial society and were critical in establishing and expanding the international trade in palm products that provided the fiscal basis for early colonial rule. Towards the turn of the century, they also pioneered the introduction of cocoa in Nigeria.

Hopkins traces the life histories of prominent members of this business community and the rise and decline of their business empires, drawing on a rich range of primary sources mostly gathered in the 1960s, including court records, land registrations, interviews with their descendants, and, in a few cases, the private papers of merchants. Most of the profiled businessmen were Saro, although Hopkins’s larger sample of roughly one hundred entrepreneurs also includes many non-Saro Africans, primarily Muslim traders.

These individual business histories are expertly set against the backdrop of the economic history of the region, which Hopkins pioneered the study of with his Ph.D. thesis on Lagos (“An Economic History of Lagos, 1880–1914,” 1964) and pathbreaking An Economic History of West Africa, first published in 1973. The narrative is organized around three shocks that shaped the business environment: the bombardment of Lagos in 1851, which created the conditions for the rise of the Saro; the British invasion of the interior and spread of colonial rule from 1892 and onward, which weakened British reliance on the African merchant community; and the First World War and interwar depression, which took a severe toll on Lagosian merchants. Throughout, Hopkins skillfully conveys a society deeply shaped by the Atlantic Slave Trade and explores the lives of individuals whose family histories were transformed by it, while allowing slavery to remain a contextual factor rather than the central theme.

Hopkins also departs a bit from current convention by using concepts such as free trade and legitimate commerce without inverted commas. Although the colonial government sometimes favored British firms, he sees the period as broadly characterized by free trade and views the transition to cash crop production (and away from exports of slaves) as genuinely disruptive and socially significant.

The findings also challenge a conventional narrative that describes the 1850s–1870s as a brief golden age of the Saro business community. He argues that while the slump in palm oil prices in the 1880s, intensification of colonial control, and heightened discrimination against Africans made conditions more challenging, the African business community demonstrated remarkable adaptability. They diversified their ventures and innovated and came to dominate the import trade, retain a foothold in export trade as middlemen, develop new service sectors, expand production for the domestic market, and pioneer new agricultural cash crops such as cocoa.

Another novel finding is the importance of the urban real estate market to their business ventures. Most of the merchants were early entrants onto the Lagos property market, where land values steadily appreciated as Lagos grew. These properties frequently served as collateral for the loans that financed business ventures, provided a financial buffer during hardship, and generated rental income for heirs after the death of the businessowner.

African development discourse has long debated the consequences of the lack of individualized land tenure in much of Africa and the obstacle this has posed to the expansion of rural credit markets. This study shows that where land scarcity quickly arose, in this case for prime urban plots, people quickly realized the value of comparatively secure and individualized land titles and actively leveraged these assets to maximize returns on capital or smooth incomes.

Overall, Hopkins provides a rich and complex account of African capitalist activity in Lagos but refrains from drawing many explicit comparisons with—or lessons for—the postcolonial period. Except for some brief remarks in the concluding chapter, readers are left to draw their own conclusions about the development significance of these findings.

The more obvious way of reading the book is as a testament to a more vibrant, larger, and innovative African business community than previously recognized, which actively shaped rather than passively reacted to a colonial presence. This community of merchants and agriculturalists clearly meet the definition of capitalists: they raised capital, took risks, experimented, and fostered the growth of markets for the factors of production, wage labor, land, and credit. They introduced, lobbied for, or adapted many foreign institutions or technologies to suit the local context, including freehold land tenure, commercial courts, wage labor contracts, mechanization in certain sectors, and, albeit unsuccessfully at first, limited liability. This raises the possibility that more studies of post-World War II Nigerian entrepreneurship might also reveal more success and innovation than conventionally assumed.

Alternatively, the book could be read against this more celebratory thesis, as yet further evidence that it is primarily outsiders, groups that stand at some distance from the host society, that have furnished successful communities of entrepreneurs in Africa. The successes of the Saro can be read alongside those of the Lebanese in West Africa, Indian minorities in East Africa, and (in more recent decades) the Fulani and Somali diasporas across the continent, as evidence of the advantages of belonging to a bounded minority, and, conversely, to impediments to indigenous business growth. The final chapter provides some interesting reflections on the differences between the activities of the leading Saro entrepreneurs and those of Chief Daniel Taiwo, one of the only non-Saro merchants to emerge from a local, chiefly lineage. Nonetheless, Hopkins holds back a little and refrains from pushing the implications of this comparison too far.

The book could have been shortened and sharpened without much loss of analytical insights, but the prologue and epilogue point to an important secondary aim. Hopkins has also set out to document for posterity the life histories of these early generations of African entrepreneurs, based on primary sources and oral testimonies that are already out of reach to contemporary researchers.

In this regard, Hopkins’s work also serves as a reminder to younger economic and business historians of the enduring value and importance of traditional approaches to studying the economic past. Working with a rich and diverse set of primary sources, Hopkins demonstrates the powerful insights that can be gained from a qualitative, narrative approach, in an era where African economic history is dominated by large datasets and quantitative analysis.