The Biafran frontier, trade, slaves, and Aro society, c. 1750-1905

grantor: University of TorontoFor 400 years, African societies supplied the labour needs of the Americas through forced migration. This reality provokes basic questions, such as how Africa supplied so many captives, the organization of the trade in the hinterland, the trade's political, social and cultural implications, its gender and other composition, and how African societies adjusted to the suppression of the trans-oceanic traffic in the 19th century. This study addresses these questions as they relate to the Bight of Biafra, a major exporting region. The region is of special interest because its trade developed relatively late, expanded dramatically from the mid-18th century onwards in the absence of large centralized states, and drew a higher proportion of females than any other region. This enquiry describes the system that produced the individuals who were forced into Atlantic slavery. Based on mariners' journals, quantitative data sets, archival material, oral data, and scholarly literature, this work demonstrates that the rise and expansion of the Aro merchant group primarily influenced the character of the Biafran trade. Unlike previous studies, which explain the organization of the hinterland trade on the basis of presence or absence of state systems, this analysis associates it with the dynamics of a trade diaspora. Seeing Aro settlements in the context of a trade diaspora throws light on crucial aspects of trade organization, commercial politics, institutional change, and cultural development. The gender structure of the Biafran trade was a function of the prevailing socio-cultural processes and the specific configuration of slave markets--domestic, Saharan, and Atlantic. Unlike existing studies of the slave trade which have sought to explain the modes of enslavement by reference to export samples alone, this work incorporates the categories of captives retained in the region. The study maintains that the means by which a person became captive was the principal determinant of his or her destination.Ph.D