Trade and Politics Behind the Slave Coast: the Lagoon Traffic and the Rise of Lagos, 1500–1800

Abstract

The rise of Lagos, which became the principal port of the ‘Slave Coast’ at the end of the eighteenth century, can only be understood by reference to the interaction between the European Atlantic trade and the indigenous canoe-borne trade along the coastal lagoons. European traders in the sixteenth century used the Lagos channel and the lagoon to approach the Ijebu kingdom, where slaves and cloth were purchased, but this trade lapsed in the seventeenth century. The Lagos settlement originated as a fishing hamlet, but was occupied as a military base by Benin around the end of the sixteenth century. Benin expansion to the west may have been designed to prevent European trade with Ijebu, in the interests of a Benin monopoly. Lagos remained formally subject to Benin until the nineteenth century, but the decline of Benin power in the eighteenth century left it effectively independent. European sources of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries attest trade in cloth and slaves passing along the lagoons through Lagos to Allada and Whydah in the west. Although this pattern of trade has been assumed to date back to pre-European times, it was more probably a consequence of the European presence, and more specifically of the westward drift of European interest along the coast from Benin after the sixteenth century. European traders began to show an active interest in the lagoon trade to the east of Allada in the early eighteenth century, and again began to explore the possibility of using the Lagos channel to bapproach the inland lagoons. Lagos developed as an Atlantic port from the 1760s, exporting slaves and Ijebu cloth, but its importance was limited by its remoteness from any major source of slaves. Its emergence as a major port in the late eighteenth century was due to the disruption of slave shipments from ports further west by military pressure from Dahomey, which led to the diversion of slave supplies eastward along the lagoons for shipment from Lagos.