This book is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of studies of the suppression of slavery during the colonial period. It differs from others in its specific focus on the issue of slave-trading, rather than the institution of slavery. It is based mainly on British colonial records (over a quarter of the text, in fact, comprising appendices of colonial documents), although some use is also made of local oral traditions. In southeastern Nigeria, as elsewhere, despite the centrality of anti-slavery rhetoric in the public justification of the establishment of British rule, subsequent policy was cautious and gradualist. This was partly due to the constraints of limited personnel, but also to fear of the disruptive social and economic consequences of precipitate emancipation, which encouraged the belief that slavery was best left to wither away in the general process of economic and social modernization which colonial rule supposedly promoted.

Afigbo also suggests that this policy reflected the declining priority attached to the issue, in comparison with consolidation of British imperial rule and commercial interests. Although the protectorate over southeastern Nigeria was originally established in 1885, slave-dealing (defined to include enslavement, as well as the sale and purchase of slaves) was not formally prohibited until 1901 (and slavery itself remained legal until 1916). Even after its legal banning, moreover, dealing in slaves, especially children, persisted. Although British military conquest broke the power of the Aro, who had been the major suppliers of slaves for the Atlantic trade in this region, in 1901–2, they survived to dominate the continuing internal trade. In the 1930s, indeed, some colonial officials believed that the slave trade might even be on the increase, provoking intensified police action against it in 1933–6, which however was not sustained. On when the slave trade came to an end (or at least declined into insignificance), the conclusions of the book are equivocal. It ceased to be a major object of official concern by the 1940s, and it is evidently this failure of documentation which explains Afigbo's chosen terminal date of 1950. He himself, however, interprets this to mean only that the administration had ‘lost interest’ in the issue (p. 114), rather than that suppression had been judged effective, and seems to imply that the slave trade continued much as before; but in his conclusion, he suggests that the slave trade had indeed ‘fizzled out’ in ‘the late 1940s or early 1950s’ (p. 129). He is unequivocal, however, in concluding that the decline of slave-trading had little to do with direct government action, but was due rather to the social and economic changes associated with colonial rule, which engendered ‘general civilization and enlightenment’ (p. 121).

Afigbo makes good use of records of prosecutions of alleged slave-dealers to illustrate the detailed workings of the trade, including the practice of concealing the acquisition and transfer of female slaves under the guise of marriage transactions, and the use of ritual sanctions to discourage escapes and ensure the silence of witnesses. He also discusses the reasons for the persistence of both the demand for and the supply of slaves in this region. On the former, he emphasizes the persistence of precolonial patterns (‘old habits died hard’ [p. 100]), such as the social prestige deriving from slave ownership, the advantages of slave over free wives in terms of control of their offspring, and the killing of slaves as funeral sacrifices. This, however, would not on the face of it explain the supposed increase in slave-trading in the 1930s; although some reference is made to the use of slaves in production for export, suggesting that colonial commercial developments might actually have increased the demand for slaves (as has been argued elsewhere), these economic aspects of the question are not addressed in a sustained fashion. On the demand side, he stresses that children were not only kidnapped, but also sometimes voluntarily sold by their families, not only for economic reasons but also as a means of getting rid of those deemed undesirable (e.g. for having violated religious taboos). One disappointment is that Afigbo's engagement with earlier historiography is restricted to literature relating specifically to southeastern Nigeria, and he cites no comparative material (not even from other areas of Nigeria). This leaves it unclear whether this case was typical, or, in so far as it had a distinctive character (as perhaps, in the apparent persistence of a significant scale of slave-dealing into the 1930s), what the reasons for this might be.