Content area
Full Text
Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900. By kristin mann. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. 488 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper); $46.75 (e-book).
Urban space provides useful grounds for examining the dynamic interactions between the global, regional, and local processes over time and space. In the context of the Atlantic slave trade, research on port cities, maroon settlements, and the development of urban ghettos has inspired scholars to consider the repercussions of the Atlantic slave trade on North and South Atlantic settlements and cities. While many of these studies have revealed varying degrees of ramifications of the Atlantic commercial system and the African slave trade on the Americas, the relationship between the Atlantic slave trade and urbanization in West Africa has received comparatively very little attention. Kristin Mann's book Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900 is a major contribution that addresses this gap through a study on the rise of Lagos and a critical assessment of its relationship with the long-term changes in the local and regional political economy and culture of the Atlantic world.
Mann is primarily concerned with the transformation of Lagos as a tiny polity that sprang "from a crossroads of regional trade and the village capital of a small and comparatively insignificant kingdom into one of Africa's most important cities" (p. 2). Mann argues that during the mid nineteenth century, Lagos became one of the most important port cities north of the equator. It outpaced its sister cities such as Ouidah and other important port cities that thrived as a result of their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in West and West Central Africa. According to Mann, factors contributing to Lagos's sudden rise to preeminence were its unique and lucrative commercial exchange and its linkages with the international commercial slaving empires, such as Brazil and Cuba. Yet, in seeking to unravel the full...