Specialists in the history of West Africa disagree about the relative importance of slaves and other commodities in African exports. Examination of the rough statistical evidence that is available indicates that slave exports earned less foreign exchange for Africa than did the single most important other export through four of the five centuries of contact between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. There were large regional differences in the pattern of African exports, and it was the dominance of gold in total African export which helped make the Gold Coast the focus of European rivalries in West Africa.

West Africa, prior to the twentieth century, has generally been considered a ‘white man's grave’. However, very few statistics have been published to support the generalization. New data on the problem of European mortality in West Africa are published here for the first time. The data, compiled from the records of the Netherlands Second West India Company, include population and death statistics for Europeans employed by the Company on the Gold Coast.

Between 1719 and 1760, the mortality rate was just under 20 per cent per year. This number is low in comparison with previously published estimates of mortality in West Africa. The data presented here may be the most extensive for the period of maritime contact which preceded the partition of Africa. The author suggests, on the basis of these statistics, that it may be necessary to consider revising European mortality estimates downward.

Recent studies by the historians of pre-colonial Africa have tended to assume that external trade has always led to the formation or enlargement of states, and was crucial for the continued existence of these states. An example where an uncritical application of the above ‘trade-stimulus hypothesis’ has led to some distortion of reality has been in the study of the Rozvi empire in Southern Rhodesia in the eighteenth century. Previous students of the Rozvi empire have claimed that the latter was such a loosely connected tribal confederacy that its internal power bases—given as military and religious—were politically so slender that on their own they could not have sustained whatever power the Rozvi ruler wielded. Instead, it is said that the main source of the power exercised by the Rozvi Mambo came mainly from the latter's ability to redistribute the profits of external trade, especially that of the gold trade of which he is said to have had a strictly enforced monopoly.

The British reduction of Lagos in 1851, their establishment of a semi-protectorate under the consuls, and the annexation of 1861 were due to a complex of causes, partly British, partly African: the movement to suppress the slave trade and to prevent its revival under the guise of contract labour; the encouragement of legitimate trade; the need to protect British and immigrant interests; missionary ambition; French rivalry; the rift in and subsequent weakness of the monarchy; the disordered state of the interior; the Dahomean threat to Abeokuta. Benjamin Campbell, the first substantive consul, laid the foundations of British rule, while his short-lived successors Brand and Foote helped to persuade the British Government that it was desirable and feasible to effect the transition to a colony. The consular decade at Lagos was a time of change which foreshadowed many of the issues of the Partition and was the first step in the making of Nigeria.

Analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dahomean history reveals, not the existence of an absolute despotism, but the presence of a complex and institutionalized political process responsive to the needs and demands of Dahomeans from every part of the country. Each year at Xwetanù (Annual Customs), Dahomean officials met to discuss and decide administrative, military, economic, and diplomatic policies of the nation. In the mid-nineteenth century an obvious polarization developed as two groups, the Elephant Party and the Fly Party, sought to mould foreign policy. The Elephant Party, composed of the Crown, the wealthiest Creole traders, and the highest male military officials, advocated continuing the established practice of capturing and exporting slaves. Therefore, the Elephant Party wanted to destroy Abeokuta, an African rival and threat to slave raiding, and to resist England, a European obstacle to the trans-Atlantic shipment of slaves. After 1840, as slaving became more difficult and as the palm oil trade emerged as an alternative to the slave trade, the Fly Party rose to challenge the goals of the Elephant Party. Comprised of the Amazon army, shrine priests, middle-level administrators, Dahomean entrepreneurs, and trade officials (groups who were unwilling to pay the costs of a major war and who were eager to gain access to the profits of ‘legitimate’ international trade), the Fly Party counselled peaceful co-existence with Abeokuta and restored commercial relations with England. Eventually, the Fly Party was able to gain ascendancy over the Elephant Party. By 1870 the great Creole traders had suffered severe economic reverses, the Crown and the high military officers were divided over the question of Abeokuta, and members of the Fly Party had obtained positions of political and economic dominance within the country. Thus, the economic and military transformations which affected all of West Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century evoked political polarizations, coalitions, and realignments in the nation of Dahomey.

Although the primary initiative in nineteenth-century Ethio-European relations came from Europe, the Ethiopian princes recurrently showed an active desire to exploit the European presence. In the first half of the century, the most active Ethiopian diplomat was Dajjāch Webē of Semēn and Tegrē (fl. 1830s–1855). Webē is taken as representative of such princes as Rās Ali and Negus Sāhla Sellāsē, who from 1827 to 1862 repeatedly launched initiatives and refined their objectives. The latter arose primarily from the desire for immediate aggrandizement and expressed themselves most commonly in the search for advanced weapons; but wider issues and the control of military technology were not ignored. The dramatic career of Emperor Tēwodros has obscured the extent to which his predecessors foreshadowed his own foreign policy. A closer look suggests that his predecessors were just as active as Tēwodros, and lacked only his breadth of understanding.

For over nine hundred years the African inhabitants of South Central Africa engaged in the production and trading of gold. The attention of archaeologists and historians, however, has focused mainly on gold reef mining. By comparison, alluvial goldwashing has been neglected, although it was practised by Africans both before and after the period during which they exploited gold reef mines. Probably at its greatest volume between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the gold trade thereafter declined, but the mining and trading of alluvial gold continued to be relatively important in the nineteenth century in what is now north-eastern Rhodesia. Largely a seasonal activity, goldwashing was normally washing was increasingly subject to interference and attempted suppression as settlers sought t o exploit alluvial areas themselves and force Africans into wage labour. This attempted suppression did not always have the intended results but may be seen generally as part of the wider structural underdevelopment of the African peasantry and precolonial industries in Southern Rhodesia.

Colonial rule embodied as a concomitant aspect ideological justifications based on racial and cultural differences, acceptance of which by the governed led to the development of a symbiotic relationship between the cultures of paternalism and subservience, a symbiosis often involving numerous ‘working misunderstandings’ arising from the application of conceptual models which had proven meaningful under quite different circumstances. This article examines the conceptual models which influenced European perceptions of Tiv society, the consequent ‘working misunderstandings’ which underlay the symbiotic relationship between government and a society subject to its jurisdiction but which had its own particular traditions, and the changes which appear to have occurred in Tiv value systems, institutions, and traditions in response to new situations. It is hoped that it will be of general interest to social and political historians, as well as those concerned with methodological problems relating to the use of ethnographic data.