Urban Slavery along the West African Coast

Slavery in cities created unique communities of coercion, and the study of urban slavery in coastal West Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries combines three sometimes distinct fields: histories of the Atlantic slave trade, African slavery, and the study of urban history in West Africa. The study of urban slavery in West Africa provides unique insights into the impact of cities on forced labor and how these labor relations shaped the growth and evolution of urban space. The urban history of coastal West Africa became entangled with the Atlantic slave trade beginning in the 15th century, but it is also an outcome of longer regional histories of urbanism. From northern Senegal to southeastern Nigeria, coastal communities that had once been on the periphery of larger interior settlements grew in importance with the expansion of Atlantic commerce that by the 18th century was dominated by slave trading. By putting slavery and urban history into the same analytical framework, scholars have explored distinctions between rural, plantation, and city-based slavery, while also exploring the ways in which these cities are tied to the West African interior and the wider Atlantic world. In distinguishing between the experiences of men and women, and the impact of age on slavery, they have shown how urban slavery was often characterized by the paradoxes of forced labor and increased mobility and autonomy. To review the nature and evolution of urban slavery over time and space in these towns and cities, scholars draw on conclusions from the literature on cities on the West African coast: including Saint Louis du Senegal, Cape Coast, Ouidah, Lagos, Bonny, and Old Calabar.