Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, "The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

New Books in Economic and Business History · Jan 28, 2022 · 59m

Despite efforts to abolish slavery throughout Africa in the nineteenth century, the coercive labor systems that constitute "modern slavery" have continued to the present day. To understand why, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine explores child trafficking, pawning, and marriages in Nigeria's Bight of Biafra, and the ways in which British colonial authorities and Igbo, Ibibio, Efik, and Ijaw populations mobilized children's labor during the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources that include oral interviews, British and Nigerian archival materials, newspaper holdings, and…