A GREAT DEBATE REVISITED From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: the Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa. Edited by ROBIN LAW. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 279. £35 (ISBN 0-521-48127-9).

Abstract

One of the great debates running through the first decades of academic research on West African history concerned the degree to which the unilateral ending of the Atlantic slave trade constituted a crisis for local societies and what link there was between this change and the imposition of formal European rule in the late 1800s. In its original form this debate has been over for some time. Most historians now agree that there was no long-term ‘crisis of transition’ on the West African coast in the early nineteenth century. Robin Law justifies the present volume by shifting attention to two secondary issues associated with the end of the slave trade: first, the transformations around inland production rather than coastal-dominated bulking and transport of vegetable exports; and second, the relationship of all these changes to the advent of colonialism. All the authors in this volume do discuss the connection between the end of the slave trade and internal systems of African production in the nineteenth century (including issues of indigenous slavery and gender relationships). Only a few concern themselves with colonial partition, although this becomes the main theme of Hopkins' concluding essay.