In this impressively researched and very readable study of the Western Slave Coast, Silke Strickrodt examines the history of the multi-ethnic communities that came into being in that area of the Atlantic coastline that lay between the more studied polities of Accra and Anlo to the west, and Ouidah to the east. This is an area that was never known as a major supplier of enslaved Africans for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Nor was it a major site for the export of agricultural produce, such as palm oil or cotton, after the slave trade ended. Still, the area is well worth studying because it served as an alternative site for settlement and trade for Africans, Euro-Africans and Europeans alike when other areas to the east and west were engulfed in war. Its location also made it a strategically important site for communication between the more prosperous polities to the west and east.

Of principal concern in this study is how the political and economic concerns of the leaders of the polities in this area – Grand Popo, Little Popo, Porto Seguro (present-day Agbodrafo) and Agoue, all on the coasts of what are now the Republics of Benin and Togo – managed their affairs in ways that made trade with Europeans alternately possible and difficult. The significance of the geographical location of these polities (sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and a series of lagoons) and of the personalities and interests of those who governed these communities is emphasized along with a number of other themes that are of interest to scholars of precolonial African history and historians of the slave trade: the relationship between the local and the global, the impact of trade on political centralization, the history of multi-ethnic urbanization prior to colonial rule, and the cross-cultural dynamics that shaped the operation of European trade in Africa.

Particularly impressive is the author's use of a wide range of archival sources in a multiplicity of languages (French, German, English, Danish, Dutch) and her command of the historical literature about the polities (Ouidah, Anlo, Asante, Akwamu, Dahomey) with which the communities she studies interacted. She begins her book with a discussion of the regional setting, and then examines, in chronological order in subsequent chapters: Little Popo and the rise of Afro-European trade, c.1600 to 1702; the era of the warrior kings, 1702–72; the era of the traders, 1772–1807; political disintegration and reconstitution, from the 1820s to the 1870s; and, in her final substantive chapter, the transition from slaves to palm oil, c.1807 to the 1870s. In her conclusions, she examines the impact of colonial partition on her area of study and its consequences for the peoples in these communities.

This is an outstanding study that fits very nicely with and helps complete our understanding of the history of European–African interactions on the coast of West Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.