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The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World. By G. Ugo Nwokeji. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xxiv, 279; map, tables, bibliography, index. $85.00.
Nwokeji's key ambition in this book is to interweave the history of an African region with the history of the Atlantic slave trade. While advances made in recent decades increasingly reveal the Atlantic system to be complicated and dynamic, the regions behind the coast remain less well understood. The hinterland of the Bight of Biafra certainly warrants attention (about 13 percent of the captives taken across the Atlantic shipped from here), but it has been poorly understood because the sources are sparse and difficult. Nwokeji's successes arise especially from carefully articulating the diverse material he has gathered through oral research and wide reading, including comparative and theoretical literature, amateur historians, and Nigerian university undergraduate theses. He also dissects the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org) for patterns in such qualities as the price, age, gender, and ethnicity of captives, and more intricate calculations such as rates of loading. The story he pieces together highlights the complexity...