In this book, which surely deserves to become a classic, Kristin Mann has brought into fruit the promise that lay in her monograph of twenty years ago on the marriage practices and strategies of elite women in nineteenth-century Lagos. Here she returns to Lagos, which she examines through the prism of slavery and the slave trade punctuated by insights into the urban history of the future Nigerian metropolis. Her command of Yoruba idiom and the range of her scholarship allow her to work through what is often difficult material with grace and clarity and to identify a host of memorable nineteenth-century characters.

The study has essentially two parts. In the first, Mann situates Lagos history in that of the slave trade and the abolitionist movement's struggle to bring it to a close. It was as Britain and France retreated from the trade that Lagos, once an unimportant fishing settlement, emerged as a slave trade emporium, located at the break in land connecting the Atlantic with the principal West African lagoon system. The intensifying links brought via the slave trade with Brazil make it clear why Lagos became known to a wider world through a Portuguese name. At the height of the Lagos slave trade, Oba Kosoko was sending children to Bahia for their education, purchasing skilled craftsmen there, corresponding regularly with agents in Brazil, and having a ship built to transport his own human cargoes across the South Atlantic. The success of Lagos led to its undoing as an independent state; in 1851 the British established an ambiguous consular authority in order to stamp out the trade, their first step into colonial power in what was to become Nigeria.

The context for this lay in the transition to so-called legitimate trade, notably in palm oil and palm kernels, a business which Mann lovingly describes and whose history she charts from heyday to stagnation and decline. As others have long noted, this led not to an end to slavery but rather to a diversion of slaves, given the massive increase in local labor requirements even though Lagos remained overwhelmingly a commercial center. Local slavery had been dominated by a few very wealthy individuals who owned a myriad of slaves, in good part as warriors, but it now became diffused through a broad population of Lagosians on a more modest but much wider scale.

This was a terrible embarrassment to the British, whose raison d'être in Lagos lay in abolition. In practice they operated, as was so typical in Asian and African colonies, by giving slavery no legal existence but officially ignoring its prevalence. While the book's first half is mainly situated in economic history, with an exhaustive treatment of the slave trade and its operations, the second is mostly a study in social history. Mann had to confront a dearth of direct references to slavery and slave life in Lagos. Yet she makes deft use of legal records, which she is able to interpret through her understanding of Lagos society. The most important records for Mann are those of the numerous struggles over land claims; as private property in land took hold, the question of where slaves lived and on what basis became fundamental to their situation. Credit, too, is taken up as a key to understand access to wealth and independence. Mann has much to say on both that transcends the subject of slavery.

This was a world where it was difficult, if not impossible, for an individual to live independently and where wage labor was uncommon and considered undesirable. Slavery survived so that men could continue to be part of successful households; if they bolted for freedom, it took the form of a change in masters where they could hope for a better deal. Occasionally they were rewarded by wealth and power in the service of their masters, and became slave owners themselves. Female slavery, probably much more prevalent, was assimilated into marriage and concubinage, and female slaves changed partners through changing masters. However, they had the hard fate of abandoning any offspring to the house in which the child was conceived. By contrast with what Laura Fair has found for Zanzibar, or Ahmed Sikainga for Khartoum, ex-slaves, while remaining a “distinct group,” did not come to form the basis for a new urban proletariat or underclass in colonial times, nor did the British seek to create such a social stratum. The Yoruba household with its internally unequal relations dominated by clientage continued to mask the antagonisms this kind of development implies. Or rather, these antagonisms were confined largely to struggles within households.

This is one of the finest books to be written on a pre-colonial African urban situation. It is self-consciously addressed to the wider literature on the slave trade and its ramifications. It also fits obviously into a related literature on the transition to freedom and contributes to the understanding of the complexities of Yoruba society. Mann sees Lagos, initially a minor state distinguished by its subordination to non-Yoruba Benin, as a trend-setting urban space from which ideas about belief, property, and subordination spread as it became richer and more important.