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Lagos, Nigeria, is a city on the make. With a documented population of 8 million now, Lagos is expected to be the third largest city in the world by 2020. Commerce thrives there, as street vendors take advantage of traffic jams to peddle to captive markets, and business people constantly negotiate deals large and small. Lagosians' legendary entrepreneurship makes sense in a city founded on trade, but the settlement's magnitude could hardly have been predicted when the first Europeans encountered it in the sixteenth century. One of many regional trade crossroads, Lagos formed the village capital of a small and insignificant kingdom. Yet by the first half of the nineteenth century, Lagos was becoming an international port linking West Africa's hinterland to the Atlantic world. Slavery and the Birth of an African City details both the major transformations in Lagos's political economy during this period and the social history of the residents most affected by it: slave-traders, slaveholders and enslaved men, women and children themselves.
Lagos's development was intimately tied up with the international slave trade and domestic slavery. After 1808, as the Atlantic slave trade entered its last, illegal phase, Lagos became the leading slave port north of the equator. More than 200,000 captives, many seized in the Yoruba wars of the hinterland, departed Lagos for slavery in Brazil and Cuba. Lagos's rulers guaranteed safe conditions for trade and invested the proceeds in canoes, weapons and people, all of which helped transform the...