People in Motion: Flexible States and Porous Boundaries in the History of Coastal West Africa (Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture)

Beginning in the late fifteenth century, more than two million people were taken from areas that lay behind the Bight of Benin, enslaved, and forced into the perilous Middle Passage bound for the New World.While a vast swath of scholarly work on this region has explored the relationships among the ruling elites and overseas traders that facilitated the transatlantic slave trade, the practices that shaped the region’s political and cultural dynamics, especially those that dealt with other kinds of trade, have yet to be thoroughly examined. In People in Motion, Sandra T. Barnes offers a history focused on the Benin Region’s patchwork of small states and ports that saw a constant movement of people and goods for centuries.As such, this book widens the lens of scholarship, formerly limited to kings and elite merchants, to include people of all social levels who provided the dynamism behind the political rivalries and changes that marked the period.Barnes concentrates on protective relation