Beschreibung
This vivid account of the rise of the remarkable slave and
palm oil trading states in the Niger delta in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries also analyses the relation of
political development to economic change. The author’s
field studies among the Ijo, Ibibio, and Ibo peoples have
made possible an analysis of the essential processes of
economic and political transformation which lay behind the
oral traditions. There are also detailed and often lively
accounts of the European traders.
The study concentrates on the two principal Oil Rivers states which
nineteenth century writers called New Calabar and Grand Bonny. For purposes
of comparison the adjacent states of Brass (Nem?) and Okrika, the Andoni
peoples and the Efik state known to Europeans as Old Calabar are also
examined. The study ends in 1884, the year that marks the beginning of the
Brithsh Protectorate government and with it the end of indigenous
systems of government which characterised these Oil River States during
the nineteenth century. The monarchies established in the eighteenth
century by King Pepple of Bonny and King Armakiri of Kalabari and the
political and economic organisations developed under their rule were
coming to, or had already come to, an end, with new oligarchies developing
in their place.
G. I. Jones first went as a colonial
officer to eastern Nigeria in 1926,
before becoming a university lecturer in social anthropology at Cambridge
after the second World War. He continued writing on the History and
culture of the peoples of eastern Nigeria until his death in 1995.