As has been well established, Atlantic commercial entanglements generated wide-reaching impacts on communities across West Africa's coast and hinterlands. The royal capitals of kingdoms engaged in the Atlantic slave trade expanded rapidly. New towns emerged in the interior to control important nodes of regional exchange. People flocked to European-controlled coastal communities, and towns grew to include populations of tens of thousands of people. Other people fled conflict to mountainous areas, building complex defensive systems to avoid capture. Overall, the period was one of major demographic upheaval and political consolidation and competition, and these processes created profound impacts on social and political systems across the region. Decades of historical and, increasingly, archaeological research have examined the close connections between the rise of large-scale expansionist states, such as Asante and Dahomey, and their capacity to centralize state power and exercise control over the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, scholars have directed significant attention to the European trading forts and castles that dotted the coastlines of these regions, highlighting their role as key ports of trade for the expanding Atlantic commercial system.

But these were not the only communities to participate in the export of human captives in the Atlantic era. What about the minor players who acted, sometimes profitably, other times less so, on the peripheries of such expansionist states? How can we begin to grasp the wide-reaching impact of the slave trade on West Africa if such societies, which were probably in the majority, are not studied with the same level of intensity as their larger expansionist neighbors?

Drawing from a large variety of documentary and oral sources, Silke Strickrodt's Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World seeks to correct this historical lacuna. This book widens our understanding of the relationship between Afro-European trade and local political dynamics to include relatively minor players in the region. To that effect, the volume focuses on the western Slave Coast, an area that Strickrodt defines as an ‘intermediate’ area between zones of greater mercantile interest, notably the Gold Coast to the west, and the eastern Slave Coast (principally Dahomey) to the east. The western Slave Coast was a region in which no large-scale expansionist states developed, no permanent European forts or castles were established, and the supply of slaves proved comparably unreliable and unpredictable. Such zones, which contributed much less to the overall volume of Atlantic trade than their neighbors, have not been deemed important enough to warrant significant historical attention. Yet, as Strickrodt shows, despite the relatively minor contribution that this region made to the overall volume of the trade, Afro-European commerce clearly produced significant implications for long-term historical developments. Indeed, the histories of towns associated with the Kingdom of Hula (Grand Popo), the Kingdom of Ge (Little Popo), as well as a wide range of smaller settlements along the coast, reveal how smaller polities struggled for economic and political survival in this period.

Chapters One and Two introduce the geographic setting and explore the rise of Afro-European trade along the western Slave Coast. Chapter One focuses on the physical environment, evidence of the earliest settlers, and the nature of the local economy and regional trade networks at the dawn of Afro-European trade. Here Strickrodt describes a series of coastal communities, united by a lagoon system that fostered east–west trade behind the coastal sandbars, yet largely blocked by the Atacora mountain chain from sustained economic interaction with the interior. Chapter Two situates the region within the context of the wider Atlantic World. It introduces the western Slave Coast's role as a secondary center for the emerging Afro-European trade that attracted minor players unable to compete at major ports like Offra and Ouidah. Despite its secondary status, commercial relations in this period generated important consequences for social and political life at the local level. More specifically, the commercial opportunities and demands of the seventeenth century stimulated competition and conflicts among leaders and drove immigration from neighboring regions (Akan, Ga, Adangme, etc.), which contributed to a series of multi-ethnic and spatially decentralized coastal communities. In this way, the onset of Afro-European commerce reoriented economic life across the region, a process that bore significant consequences for its social and cultural fabric.

These processes set the stage for the remainder of the book, which examines the dynamic relationship between international trade and local politics in the western Slave Coast until the close of the nineteenth century. Chapter Three examines how coastal kingdoms in the eighteenth century struggled for dominance over the intensifying slave trade in a period marked by increased warfare and violence. Here Strickrodt highlights how military incursions by rising powers to the west (Akwamu) and east (Dahomey) generated dislocation, banditry, and social upheaval across the region. Within this context, Strickrodt explores how Little Popo managed to assert its territorial dominance despite its troubled associations with European traders, a dynamic that highlights the complex relationship between war and the Atlantic slave trade in eighteenth-century West Africa. Chapter Four describes political developments from the end of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, when the slave trade declined. Strickrodt demonstrates that coastal African trading families often succeeded in setting the terms of the trade, often to the dismay of their political leaders, and succeeded in shifting the balance of power in their favor. By way of contrast, Chapters Five and Six focus on how coastal communities adapted to the abolition of the slave trade and the shift towards ‘legitimate’ commerce in agricultural products. This transition accentuated local trading rivalries and factional conflicts, which sometimes resulted in war, but which also led to the establishment of new towns such as Porto Seguro and Agoué, which sometimes served as outlets for the clandestine slave trade. Lastly, the epilogue examines the onset of colonial rule. It describes how local political instabilities led rulers to cede territory to European powers, and how the arbitrariness of the colonial partition wreaked havoc on the economic support that towns had heretofore reaped from their respective hinterlands.

Strickrodt raises many themes that are familiar to those working on the relationship between Afro-European trade and local political and economic transformations elsewhere on the Slave Coast. Indeed, the emergence of multi-ethnic communities, the relationship between war and slavery, the expansion of the economic and political power of coastal trading families, and the destabilizing effects of the transition to ‘legitimate’ commerce are major historiographical themes in Dahomey to the east. However, unlike Dahomey, there were no large-scale centralized kingdoms in the western Slave Coast to absorb and mitigate the destabilizing forces unleashed by the slave trade. Rather, in the case described in this volume, we learn how small-scale towns and kingdoms navigated this shifting landscape in the absence of the overarching bureaucratic and military structures that served to maintain political order in Dahomey.

This book thus provides a valuable new corrective to our understanding of the role of trans-Atlantic commerce in shaping the long-term histories of communities across the region. Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World is accessible and rich in historical detail, and it will find a welcome home on the bookshelves of scholars interested in the trans-Atlantic slave trade's impact on West African societies.