I

Britain’s abolition of its slave trade in 1807 and its subsequent efforts to suppress slave carrying by other countries had an important impact on Afro- European relations in West Africa. In the Bight of Biafra, the external pressure to end slave exports led to expanding exports of other products, even while exports of slaves continued, legally or otherwise. The local merchants who had once supplied British merchants before 1808 were able to shift their business to non-British slave traders, at least until 1841, at the same time as exports of palm oil expanded to meet rising British demand for industrial raw materials. The effects of this shift towards non-slave exports, replicated in varying degrees and at different speeds in other African regions, raise the question of the compatibility of slave and non-slave exports as reflected in the trends in coastal slave prices and in levels of slave holding on the coast. Although slave ownership expanded after 1807 in areas associated with commercial production of oil, it is likely that British abolition prompted an immediate fall in export earnings of local merchants in regions such as the Bight of Biafra, but this was subsequently reversed with reviving slave exports and the recovery of slave prices associated with the expansion of so-called ‘legitimate’ exports such as oil. This trend appears to have continued beyond the closure in 1841 of the export slave trade from the Bight of Biafra as slaves increasingly became producers of commodities for trade rather than commodities of trade themselves. It is argued here that despite the apparent ease of transition in the Bight of Biafra in the period after 1807, British abolition prompted important institutional adjustments to international trade relations in the region. Whether these amounted to a ‘crisis of adaptation’, as Hopkins and others have claimed for this period of change, remains unclear.

European trade in the Bight of Biafra was largely concentrated at two places, Old Calabar on the Cross River and Bonny at the mouth of the Rio Real. In the early eighteenth century, Old Calabar was the premier trading venue in the region but by the 1740s, at least, its ascendancy was lost to its rival on the Rio Real.