ABSTRACT
The transatlantic slave trade was the largest long-distance coerced migration in history. On the African side, three regions - the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin and Bight of Biafra - dominate the historiography. These areas tend to be seen as the centre of gravity of the traffic not just from West Africa but from the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, a situation captured by the description of a section of the Bight of Benin as 'the Slave Coast' on most maps printed before 1820. With the possible exception of Senegambia, the history of these regions is better known than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. These regions also contained the largest population densities on the subcontinent, and, consistent with this, contained the greatest urban development and, in the cases of the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin, the most sophisticated state structures. All three regions tended to draw on largely exclusive provenance zones, and indeed there is a reasonably exclusive ethno-linguistic homogeneity within their hinterlands. Yet it is still useful to treat these areas together. African slave traders were always likely to view embarkation points in the east of the Bight of Benin and the west of the Bight of Biafra as alternate routes - particularly after Lagos began its rise to major outlet status in the late eighteenth century - and European traders often ensured that ties existed between ports in the eastern Gold Coast and western Slave Coast.1
