From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the Bight of Biafra supplied about 13 per cent of captives sent into the Atlantic. Exports were relatively low until second quarter of the eighteenth century, when they increased dramatically. Trade from the Bight of Biafra was especially heavy in the second half of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth. Throughout the eighteenth century, the region was the second most important supplier of captives for the Atlantic trade. In this book, Nwokeji asks how a region lacking large centralized states produced captives in such great numbers.

For the Bight of Biafra, this question is a difficult one to answer. There are few written sources about happenings beyond the immediate coast. Further, the decentralized societies that dominate the region do not preserve oral traditions in the same detail as state-based societies in other parts of the continent. Nwokeji derives answers by pursuing an innovative methodology. He weds chronologically vague oral traditions with export data for the region to piece together a story that is both compelling and important. Indeed, this book details better than any before it the workings of slaving networks in an area central to the Atlantic economy.

Through chapters that are arranged both chronologically and thematically, Nwokeji focuses most of his attention on the Aro, the group responsible for orchestrating the trade of captives in the Bight of Biafra. The rise of the slave trade from the Bight of Biafra corresponded with the migration of Aro from their homeland in Arochukwu to areas south of the Cross River which were inhabited by Igbo. Nwokeji skirts debates about whether the Aro were a state-based or stateless society, writing that they are best understood as a trade diaspora, or a ‘nation of socially interdependent, but spatially dispersed, communities’ (p. 17). In these communities developed a unique culture that owed itself to and can only be understood in the context of an engagement with Atlantic trade.

After introducing his study, Nwokeji first outlines the Aro expansion from the 1600s to 1807. He then examines the changing nature of Aro commercial organization from 1740 to 1850. Here Nwokeji explains the success of the Aro by arguing that as slave dealers, they ‘performed the role of disposing of dissenters, local political rivals, and incriminated persons, who were sold into slavery as punishment or reprisal’ (p. 81). Though Aro-sponsored wars produced some captives, ‘Aro generally preferred peace to war’, wars being carried out, most often, only for the purpose of dominating trade. Another chapter examines the nature of the culture that Aro and Igbo constructed as they engaged with one another and with the Atlantic. Nwokeji also profiles the slaves sold for export, arguing that market forces were not all that important in determining who was retained and who was sold. Rather, ‘the choices slave holders made reflected their idea of the ideal society’ (p. 143). Culturally informed decisions were particularly important in shaping the gender ratio of slaves exported from the Bight of Biafra. The region displayed a high average for female exports in large part because males were important for field work. The last chapter examines the aftermath of the slave trade. Here Nwokeji explores how the ending of the trade ‘failed to relieve the affected societies of violence and insecurity’ (p. 202).

If the study has any flaws, they are trivial. From my perspective, it would have benefited from two things. First, there is very little comparison to other ‘stateless’ or ‘decentralized’ regions of Africa. Considerable work has been done on small-scale societies in Upper Guinea, but Nwokeji never makes meaningful references to it. Second, as Nwokeji drew me deeper into Aro and Igbo societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I found myself wondering what those whose lives were affected by engagement with the Atlantic thought? Nwokeji says little about how people coped with the proliferation of kidnapping, fear of raids and possibility of being convicted and sold for an offence. Supernatural explanations for misfortunate and for disparities in wealth and power that were common in many parts of Africa are not explored in this book. Indeed, ‘witchcraft’, which has been the subject of much recent scholarship on slavery and slave trading, is hardly mentioned. Spiritual power and the ways in which it had to have been reconfigured, rethought, and reinvented in periods of social, political and economic realignment is also not a subject of study. One point to correct: the first known reference to ‘Ibo’ dates to the sixteenth century and not to the seventeenth (p. xv), which may or may not have something to say about the dynamics of regional identities.

But these are small criticisms that do not detract from the fact Nwokeji's book is social history at its very best. It should be indispensible for scholars and students of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. It will serve as a model for future work on the mechanics of the slave trade within Africa. Nwokeji shows that by combining export data collected in European and American archives with oral histories and on-the-ground ethnographic research, scholars can write meaningful histories of the continent for periods before the twentieth century. Well written and well documented, this is a book I look forward to teaching and to returning to for many years to come.