Historians of Africa owe an immense debt to K. O. Dike's Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885, published in 1956. Not only did Trade and Politics present a new way of looking at West Africa's past from the point of view of West Africans themselves, it also played a major role in the emergence of the modern academic study of the history of the African continent. For me as for many of my generation, it was Trade and Politics that provided one of the earliest entries into the rewards of studying West African history and first stimulated my interest in the issues that are covered in this work. Although this book covers much of the same ground, namely the development of the palm oil trade, it is not an attempt to replace Trade and Politics. The present work eschews Dike's concentration on political conflict to present an entirely economic history of the palm oil trade. It thus does not engage with the debate on the origins of British imperial expansion in West Africa, except tangentially; its aim is to provide a contribution to West Africa's economic history, an aim which I consider valuable in itself.

This book's focus is on a commodity – palm oil – that for centuries has been of importance to millions of Africans and which in the nineteenth century became similarly important to Europeans, and it examines the relationship between West Africa and Britain that ensued from its trade. It attempts to go beyond the usual studies that look simply at the British side of this relationship or at the West African; …