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6 - Owners, slaves and the struggle for labour in the commercial transition at Lagos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2009

Robin Law
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
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Summary

The degree to which slaves could participate in the palm produce trade in their own behalf remains a key question in the debate over the impact of the transition from the slave trade to the vegetable products trade in nineteenth-century West Africa. Did the new ‘legitimate’ commerce create opportunities for slaves to trade for themselves, and through their efforts to accumulate resources, as many contemporary Europeans believed it would? Could slaves, on the basis of greater wealth, redefine their relationship with their owners, rising even to challenge the authority of the established rulers? Or did the old slave-trading oligarchies dominate the trade in palm produce, as they had that in slaves, retain control of the labour of their slaves, and maintain their political authority? Alternatively, could new, large-scale entrepreneurs capture the labour of slaves, harness it in trade, and challenge the pre-eminence of the old oligarchies? This essay provides a new perspective on these problems not by looking at trade and politics, the usual approach, but rather by probing the owner–slave relationship during the era of the transition. The data come from Lagos, a leading centre of the palm produce trade, whose late nineteenth-century sobriquet, the ‘Liverpool of Africa’, captures its commercial importance.

Lagos emerged as a centre of the slave trade late in the history of the commerce, between roughly 1780 and 1860.

Type
Chapter
Information
From Slave Trade to 'Legitimate' Commerce
The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa
, pp. 144 - 171
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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