ABSTRACT
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the coastal groups and immediate hinterland were in full expansion, no matter what their political organization: centralized state, city-state, kinship-based society, or even British colony (Sierra Leone). States such as that of the Asante based their power on their location between the savanna and the rain forest. The kingdoms of Abomey and especially of Porto-Novo; the peoples of the Niger River Delta and backcountry, the Cameroon coast, and the Portuguese-dominated islands of São Tomé; and the Orungu and Mpongwe living at the mouth of the Ogooué were all dependent on the Atlantic economy. While the slave trade had re-surged at the end of the eighteenth century, after the downswing resulting from the American War of Independence, in the nineteenth century most of the societies, especially those along the lower Niger, were able to convert to “licit” trade. 1
