of the slave trade, and the impact of participation in this trade on the historical development of the African societies involved. The present work, however, is informed by a significantly different perspective. My earlier analysis was very much written from the viewpoint of the Dahomian monarchy, in effect of the inland capital city of Abomey; and this focus is shared by other earlier work on the history of Dahomey, including the major published studies by Ade Akinjogbin (1967) and Edna Bay (1998), and the unpublished doctoral theses of David Ross (1967) and John Reid (1986).12 This more recent research, on the other hand, in focusing on the coastal commercial centre of Ouidah, represents, if not quite a view from below, nevertheless a perspective from what was, in political terms, the periphery rather than the centre. It therefore foregrounds rather different aspects of the operation of the slave trade, including especially the evolution of the merchant community in Ouidah, and in particular the growth of a group of private traders that was distinct from the official political establishment, and whose relations with the Dahomian monarchy grew increasingly problematic over time.13
African coastal entrepôts such as Ouidah played a critical role in the operation of the Atlantic slave trade, by helping to coordinate exchanges between hinterland suppliers and European ships, thereby accelerating their turn-round, and also by supplying them with provisions to feed the slaves on their voyage.14 In addition to extending and deepening understanding of the working of the slave trade, a study of Ouidah also represents a contribution to a second area of growing interest recently within African historical studies, urban history. Studies of urban history in Africa have tended to concentrate on the growth of towns during the colonial and post-colonial periods;15 but in West Africa especially, substantial towns existed already in the pre-colonial period, and Ouidah offers an exceptionally well-documented case-study of this earlier tradition of urbanism.16 Within southern Bénin, Ouidah provides the premier example of the ‘second generation’ of precolonial towns, which served as centres for European maritime trade: what have been termed, although somewhat infelicitously, ‘fort towns [villes-forts]’, in distinction from the ‘first generation’ of ‘palace-cities [cités-palais]’, which served as capitals of indigenous African states, such as Abomey.17
The study of African coastal communities such as Ouidah also has a relevance for the currently fashionable project of ‘Atlantic history’, i.e. the attempt to treat the Atlantic as a historical unit, stressing interactions among the various states and communities that participated in the construction and operation of the trans-Atlantic trading system.18 Although proponents of Atlantic history have tended to concentrate on links between Europe and the Americas, it needs to be recognized that African societies were also active participants in the making of the Atlantic world.19 If there was an ‘Atlantic community’, the African coastal towns which served as embarkation points for the trans-Atlantic slave trade were part of it, their commercial and ruling elites being involved in political, social and cultural networks, as well as purely business linkages, which spanned the ocean.20 The study of such African towns, moreover, adds an important comparative dimension to our understanding of the growth and functioning of port cities in the Atlantic world in the era of the slave trade, since previous studies of Atlantic port towns in this period have concentrated on ports in the Americas.21 But such American ports were European colonial creations, which functioned as enclaves or centres of European power, a model that is not applicable to Atlantic ports in Africa, which remained under indigenous sovereignty (apart from the exceptional case of Luanda in Angola, which uniquely had already become a Portuguese colony in the sixteenth century).
There have been a number of studies of particular West African coastal ‘port’ communities in the pre-colonial period, which have served to delineate a number of general issues in their history: the organization of overseas commerce, the relationships between ports and their hinterlands, the effects of their involvement in Atlantic commerce on their political and social structures and demographic growth, and the problems posed for them by the transition from the slave trade to exports of agricultural produce such as palm oil in the nineteenth century.22 Much of this work, however, has dealt with the general history of the states or communities in which ports were situated, rather than with the specific history of the port towns themselves. Examples are, within the Slave Coast, studies of two coastal communities west of Ouidah, the Gen kingdom (which included the port of Little Popo, modern Aného) by Nicoué Gayibor, and the Anlo confederacy (including the port of Keta) by Sandra Greene.23 Those studies which have focused on the history of coastal towns specifically have generally related to communities which were ‘city-states’, in the sense of being independent of outside political authority: examples being, on the eastern Slave Coast, the study of Badagry by Caroline Sorensen-Gilmour; and beyond the Slave Coast, in the Bight of Biafra to the east, those of Bonny by Susan Hargreaves, of New Calabar by Waibinte Wariboko, Old Calabar by John Latham, and Douala by Ralph Austen and Jonathan Derrick.24 In consequence, these have a rather different and more diffuse focus than the present work, which seeks to highlight especially the development and functioning of Ouidah as an urban community. The work which comes closest to my own concerns among earlier studies of West African port communities is Harvey Feinberg’s study of Elmina, on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), to the west.25 But Elmina was a very different sort of place from Ouidah, not only in being a ‘city-state’, but also in the preponderant influence exercised there by a European power, in the form of the Dutch West India Company, so that its history, in relation to that of Ouidah, is illuminating as much by way of contrasts as of similarities.
The case of Ouidah may also serve to refine or qualify some of the conventional conceptual categories that have been applied to West African ‘port’ communities. In the most general terms, Ouidah can be interpreted as a ‘middleman’ community: this term being understood, as Austen and Derrick propose for the case of Douala, not only in relation to the exchange of commodities, but also with reference to the role of such coastal communities as intermediaries in the transmission of cultural influences, and in the longer term in mediating the accommodation of African societies to European economic and political dominance.26 However, the more specific categories that have been developed in order to elucidate the interstitial position of African coastal ‘middleman’ communities seem more problematic. The concept of an ‘enclave-entrepôt’, applied to Elmina by Feinberg, for example, does not fit the case of Ouidah, where European power was much more limited, and which in this was a more typical case.27 That of a neutral ‘port of trade’, propounded by economic anthropologists of the ‘substantivist’ school, such as Karl Polanyi, although elaborated with reference to the specific case of Ouidah, is not in fact sustained by the detailed empirical evidence relating to the operation of the Atlantic trade there.28
Chronologically, this study concentrates on the period of Dahomian rule over Ouidah, after 1727, although an introductory chapter deals with the town’s origins, including its earlier history under the Hueda kingdom. The justification for this emphasis relates basically to the nature of the available source material, which is much more abundant for the Dahomian period. This, however, also reflects the fact that Ouidah became much more important under Dahomian rule, not only as a commercial centre, but also now as a centre of provincial administration. The study effectively concludes with the French occupation in 1892, although with a brief epilogue treating the fate of the town under colonial rule. This has been done with some hesitation, since in general there is a strong case for downplaying the conventional perception of the establishment of colonial rule as a watershed, and for tracing continuities and transformations in the ‘middleman’ role into the colonial period, as was illuminatingly done by Austen and Derrick for the case of Douala.29 However, whereas in the cases of ports that remained prominent into the colonial period – such as Accra in Ghana, and Lagos in Nigeria, as well as Douala in Cameroun – the reality of continuity is transparent, this is less true of Ouidah, where the imposition of colonial rule represented more of a historical break. The experience of Ouidah under colonialism was essentially of economic and political marginalization; although this process had begun already in the second half of the nineteenth century, and was only intensified and accelerated by the changed conditions of colonial rule.
