R.A. Sargent: “From a Redistribution to an Imperial Social Formation: Benin c. 1293–1536”

Abstract

R.A. Sargent's article raises more questions than it provides answers, but this should not be taken as adverse criticism. To a generation of historians of Africa, answers have come rather too easily; it is now time to look for the questions we have been answering. Sargent is prepared to accept for his present purposes the reconstruction of Benin chronology made by F.B. Ataba. He inherits, too, the very considerable and respectable corpus of work on Benin by such writers as J.U. Egharevba, R.E. Bradbury and A.F.C. Ryder. Sargent is not concerned with criticizing these works but rather with identifying the trajectory of change in Benin history from the late thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. In particular, he is interested in those changes in government and administration which were initiated in the reign of the late-fourteenth-century Oba Edwedo and which, over the next century and a half, were radically to transform the nature of the Benin polity. Sargent describes a process that transformed Benin from a segmentary redistributive social into imperial trading formation. Much of the interest of his article, however, lies in his argument that throughout the period in question the Otu system remained the mode of production in Benin, having an inordinate capacity to expand and develop productive ability. Sargent does, nevertheless, allow for the development of a mode of production based upon the increasing use of slave labor, inevitably raising issues of a singularly controversial and even intractable kind. What, for example, is the relationship between social formation and mode of production? How is the social formation to change if the mode of production does not? Are we being drawn, without being told so, into the recurrent debate on the so-called Asiatic mode of production? Should we speak of dominant and secondary modes of production, or is it more rewarding to regard the latter as indicative or diagnostic of a transition from one mode of production to another? Sargent himself describes the and modes of production as complementary, yet proceeds (if I understand him correctly) to show that they were in fact in