7 - Slaves, Igbo women and palm oil in the nineteenth century

Summary

Like many of the other papers in the present collection, this one engages with the arguments of Tony Hopkins. Indeed, it was inspired by the experience of sitting in his Masters' class some fifteen years ago and hearing him lament the shortage of research on smallholders. In his view ‘the modern economic history of West Africa’ is in large part the history of their efforts in developing agricultural export production, efforts which were truly heroic given their limited access to capital, the ‘traditional tools’ and family labour on which they relied, and the long-standing local dominance of slave-using warriors and merchants, who continued to threaten both their peace and their profits. Given the well-documented importance of smallholders in twentieth-century West Africa, it seemed a pity that so little was known about them in the nineteenth. In particular, it was difficult to test two of Hopkins' assumptions: that free smallholder, as opposed to large-scale, slave-based, export production was significant from the start; and that the smallholder households of the nineteenth century were similar in their production techniques and social structure to their ‘modern’, mid twentieth-century counterparts.