Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900

489 Pages·2007·2.5 MB·English

by  Kristin Mann

African Studies · History Mann “This is a major
contribution to African
Probes the relationship between the slave
history, to slave studies,
trade and one of Africa’s most vibrant centers
and to urban history.”
This book investigates the relationship between long-term changes in the economy and culture
M artin Klein
of the Atlantic world and the history of a small but globally signifi cant portion of the West
African coast. The slave trade, which in the roughly 350 years of its existence forcibly exported
approximately 12.4 million Africans to the Americas to provide labor for the development of
plantation societies there, fi rst brought the West and the territory the world now knows as As the slave trade entered its last, illegal phase
Lagos into steady and intimate contact with one another. Yet soon after the commerce took Slavery and the Birth in the nineteenth century, the town of Lagos
root at Lagos in the late eighteenth century, a great shift in moral consciousness in the West led on West Africa’s Bight of Benin became one
Britain, then the dominant power in the Atlantic world, to reconceptualize Europe’s relation- Slavery of the most important port cities north of the
ship with Africa and resolve to abolish the trade in human beings in the Bight of Benin, where equator. Slavery and the Birth of an African City
of an African City
Lagos is located, and elsewhere. —from the introduction and the explores the reasons for Lagos’s sudden rise
to power. By linking the histories of interna-
Birth
tional slave markets to those of the regional
suppliers and slave traders, Mann shows how
of an the African slave trade forever altered the
destiny of the tiny kingdom of Lagos. This
African Lagos, 1760–1900
Kristin Mann is Professor of History at magisterial work uncovers the relationship
Emory University. She is author of Marrying between African slavery and the growth of
City
Well: Marriage, Status, and Social Change among the one of Africa’s most vibrant cities.
Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos and editor (with
Edna G. Bay) of Rethinking the African Diaspora:
The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of
Benin and Brazil.
Jacket illustrations: Lagos 1865, drawing by
Author photo: Jonathan Hillyer Photogra- INDIANA Marguerite Fletcher based on an image from
Kristin Mann
phy, Inc. the Nigeria National Museum, Onikan; Con-
University Press
Bloomington & Indianapolis INDIANA temporary Lagos, photo by A. Adebayo.
http://iupress.indiana.edu
1-800-842-6796
Slavery
and the
Birth
of an
African City

Slavery
and the
Birth
of an
African City
Lagos, 1760–1900
Kristin Mann
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
Orders by e-mail [email protected]
© 2007 by Kristin Mann
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or uti-
lized in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying and record-
ing, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the
publisher. The Association of American Univer-
sity Presses’ Resolution on Permissions consti-
tutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the
minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences–Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mann, Kristin, 1946-
Slavery and the birth of an African city : Lagos, 1760–1900 / Kristin Mann.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34884-5 (cloth)
1. Slave trade–Nigeria–Lagos–History–18th century. 2. Slave trade–Nigeria–Lagos–History–19th
century. 3. Lagos (Nigeria)–History–18th century. 4. Lagos (Nigeria)–History–19th century.
5. Lagos (Nigeria)–Commerce–History–18th century. 6. Lagos (Nigeria)–Commerce–History–19th
century. 7. Slave trade–Great Britain–History–18th century. 8. Slave trade–Great Britain–History–19th
century. 9. Great Britain–Commerce–History. 10. Great Britain–Colonies–Africa. I. Title.
HT1394.L34M36 2007
306.3'6209669109033–dc22
2006037963
1 2 3 4 5 12 11 10 09 08 07
To Steve and Evan,
And from them, as well

Contents acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1.The Rise of Lagos as an Atlantic Port, c. 1760–1851 23
2.Trade, Oligarchy, and the Transformation of the
Precolonial State 51
3.The Original Sin: Anti-slavery, Imperial Expansion, and Early
Colonial Rule 84
4.Innocent Commerce: Boom and Bust in the Palm Produce
Trade 117
5.Britain and Domestic Slavery 160
6.Redefining the Owner-Slave Relationship: Work, Ideology,
and the Demand for People 200
7.The Changing Meaning of Land in the Urban Economy
and Culture 237
8.Strategies of Struggle and Mechanisms of Control: Quotidian
Conflicts and Court Cases 277
Conclusion 313
notes 327
bibliography 423
index 459

Acknowledgments
This book draws on data collected over a long period of time, beginning
with my dissertation research in Nigeria and England during the 1970s
and continuing to the present. Financial support from a number of gov-
ernment agencies and private organizations has aided my work, and I am
pleased to acknowledge and express thanks for several of the most salient
grants. They include a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Fellowship,
a Fulbright Senior Research Award, a Social Science Research Council
Research Planning Activity Award, a National Endowment for the Hu-
manities Senior Research Fellowship, and two Emory University Re-
search Committee Awards. A sabbatical from Emory University and a fel-
lowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation funded
a leave from teaching in 2002, when I wrote or revised much of the man-
uscript.
The staffs at the many libraries, archives, and record offices cited in
the endnotes and bibliography aided my research and deserve sincere
thanks. A few, however, offered such sustained and generous support that
I want to mention them individually. Elizabeth McBride, the African
Studies Collection Development Specialist at Emory University’s
Woodruff Library, provided invaluable assistance at numerous stages of
my research, as did the staff of Woodruff’s Interlibrary Loan Department.
The registrars and staffs at the Lagos Land Registry, Lagos Probate Reg-
istry, and Lagos State High Court granted me access to the public docu-
ments they oversee and week after week cheerfully welcomed me as I
worked in their crowded quarters.
A number of scholars have generously shared data, documents, or
ideas with me. Early in the project, when I had just begun research on the
slave trade at Lagos, Paul Lovejoy and David Trotman folded me into the
expansive embrace of the Nigerian Hinterland Project, based at York
University in Toronto and funded largely by the Social Science and Hu-
manities Research Council of Canada. There followed a moveable feast of
workshops and conferences organized on four continents, which did
much to stimulate my thinking and advance my research. Sandra Barnes,