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 small kingdom into a significant commercial and political power. As elsewhere, the slave trade brought a major new means of acquiring and holding dependents, increasing the importance of slavery in a context where people were valued both for labor and as political assets. By the 1850s, the majority of Lagos's population may well have been slaves, most of them probably women.

The growth of the slave trade at Lagos made it notorious in British antislavery circles and contributed to its colonization. In an attempt to suppress slave exports, British officials ordered the bombardment of Lagos in 1851 and its colonization ten years later, well before the scramble for Africa brought European colonialism to most of the rest of the continent. By then the gradual transition from slave to produce trading, mainly in palm oil, was well underway, promoted by British antislavery sentiment as well as European and African economic interests. The palm oil trade exploded in the second half of the nineteenth century, earning Lagos the label ‘The Liverpool of West Africa’.

In spite of British antislavery ideology, the conquest of Lagos and development of the palm oil trade did not lead to a quick end to slave trading or slaveholding. The Lagos case presented in this book largely confirms what historians already know about the vexed history of abolition in Africa: that antislavery helped usher in imperialism, but that the abolition of slavery under colonial regimes was slow and uneven. After an enthusiastic start, British officials began to fear that abolishing slavery would cause social and economic dislocation as well as alienate the elites whose cooperation they needed. Ambiguously, they abolished the legal status of slavery and quietly maintained that slaves could use the new colonial courts to settle disputes with owners. Mostly, however, officials left it to time and slaves themselves to refine their relationships with owners and their place in society.

Meanwhile, local demand for labor was increasing, largely because the production and trade of palm produce were labor-intensive. The palm oil trade, lauded by European opponents of slavery, actually brought an expansion of local slave-owning and changed the nature of slavery, increasing the value of slaves purely as workers. The struggles of slave owners to maintain access to the labor and deference of dependents, and those of bondspeople to improve their material conditions and take advantage of new opportunities in the colonial economy, form the heart of this book. Making extensive use of court records and oral interviews collected over the last three decades, Mann offers readers a rich social history of nineteenth-century Lagos, highlighting the stories of individuals as well as overall trends.

Although the growth of the palm produce trade, combined with colonial rule, created new opportunities for ex-slaves, it also benefitted elites, who shaped customary law and new credit and land markets to maintain and expand their access to labor. Slaves, even without resources, could leave owners, trading slavery for other relationships of subordination in the city. Owners responded by importing considerable numbers of children, easier to control and incorporate than adult slaves, from the hinterland. They often redefined the enslavement of women and girls as marriage and turned to colonial officials to uphold patriarchal authority. Households began reshaping relationships between overlords and strangers to make the labor obligations of strangers more explicit and exacting. And prominent Lagosians used their control over land, housing and credit to uphold their influence over slaves and other dependents.

In Mann's meticulous reconstruction, late nineteenth-century Lagos emerges as a post-emancipation society, implicitly comparable to those in the Americas. As elsewhere, demand for labor remained strong as slavery was slowly ending and a wage labor market was not yet beginning. Mann's most important contribution is to document how this process took shape in colonial Lagos. Wage labor began to emerge in Lagos only around the 1890s, yet it remained – and remains – attractive and available for only a small minority of working people there. Relations of dependency – articulated in the language of kinship, patronage, affection, affiliation and so on – continue to permeate economic and political life in Lagos. Is there a direct line of continuity between the nineteenth century and today? In other words, what is the lasting significance of the history of slavery for this 21st-century megalopolis? Although we do not get a sense of Lagos's spectacular efflorescence in the late twentieth century, Slavery and the Birth of an African City provides a masterful account of its early rise.