Ouidah. Robin Law
of the revenue from the royal duty on slave exports, levied at 5 ‘galinas’ of cowries (1,000 shells) per slave, which would have yielded (on exports of 10,000 slaves per year) the value of 250 slaves annually, although the king’s total revenue from the slave trade, including ‘customs’ (in contemporary parlance, payments for permission to trade) and the proceeds of his own sales of slaves, was much higher than this, estimated in this period at around 30 slaves’ value per ship.180 It is not specified at what rate the toll on fish was levied, but if it was comparable to that levied generally on sales in the kingdom, which was one-tenth,181 this would suggest a total output for the fishing industry of the value of 2,000 slaves annually, which was around a fifth of slave exports through Ouidah in the 1690s. It was also very substantially greater than the total paid for portering, as calculated earlier (and, if incomes from fishing were comparable to the wages paid to porters, would suggest that fishing employed around 2,400 persons). Although this figure for fish production is for the Hueda kingdom as a whole, rather than for Ouidah alone, any reasonable assumption of the share to be assigned to Ouidah would still leave fishing as a larger sector of its economy than portering.
The rise and fall of the Hueda kingdom
In a recent study, David Eltis suggested that, despite considerable research on the history of Hueda, ‘the question of why this small African state was so dominant in the slave trade still has no answer’.182 This seems an unduly pessimistic assessment of previous research. It is true that Ouidah had no obvious geographical advantage over other ports in the region, either in terms of coastal harbour facilities (of which, in common with its rivals, it had none) or of access to inland waterways (for which it was no better positioned than its competitors to west and east). As regards its geographical situation, the principal advantage possessed by Ouidah was its proximity to and accessibility from the powerful kingdoms in the immediate interior which were the principal suppliers of slaves to the coast, initially Allada (and, after 1727, Dahomey). This advantage, of course, was equally shared by Offra to the east, which in fact preceded Ouidah as the main outlet for Allada’s slave trade. The story of Offra’s displacement by Ouidah in the 1670s, however, is straightforward (and well-known). The initial diversion of trade from Offra to Ouidah in 1671 was due to a rebellion by Offra against Allada’s authority, which closed the paths between the two; and difficulties in relations between Allada and Offra recurred through the following two decades, culminating in the war in which Offra was destroyed in 1692, an event that decisively confirmed the commercial supremacy of Ouidah. In the early eighteenth century the kings of Allada sought to redivert trade away from Ouidah through a ‘port’ under their own control, now Jakin, which inherited the commercial role of Offra, and initially with some success. But this process was overtaken by the Dahomian conquest of both Allada and Hueda in the 1720s, which served to remove obstacles to the passage of trade to Ouidah; and, even more critically, by the subsequent Dahomian destruction of Jakin in 1732, which reconfirmed the concentration of trade at Ouidah.183
A second factor in the shift from Offra to Ouidah is implied in a letter from the English Royal African Company to the king of Hueda in 1701, which states that the English had moved there because of the ‘ill treatment’ which they had received in Allada.184 One aspect of the better treatment offered at Ouidah was that the Hueda kings accepted lower levels of ‘customs’ for permission to trade. In the 1680s the French at Ouidah were paying the value of 25 slaves per ship for customs, whereas at Offra they had paid 50; total charges, including the hire of porters and canoemen, came to between 32 and 35 slaves per ship at the former, but between 70 and 80 at the latter.185 By the 1690s, the rate of customs at Ouidah had fallen further, to only 8 slaves, 6 to the king and 2 to the ‘caboceers’, or chiefs.186 A second aspect was the problem of theft, and the failure of the Allada authorities to repress it; another observer in 1701 explained that no trade was done any longer at Allada, because of the reputation of its people for ‘cheating and stealing’.187 Correspondence from the English company’s Offra factory in the early 1680s also alludes to problems in recovering debts.188
To the extent that the greater attractiveness of Ouidah over Offra related to the policies pursued by their rulers, these were subject to change over time. By the 1710s the differential in customs between Ouidah and its rivals had been substantially reduced, although not entirely eliminated; the charges for permission to trade at Jakin, now the principal port of Allada, being only 12 slaves in all (6 to the king, 4 to the governor of Jakin, one each to two other chiefs), doubtless driven down by the need to compete with Ouidah.189 By the 1690s also, Ouidah itself had acquired a reputation for the prevalence of petty theft, both by porters carrying goods up from the beach and from the European warehouses, the people of Ouidah being considered worse thieves than those of the Gold Coast.190 There is no record, however, of problems at Ouidah over issues of credit: an account of trading in the 1690s stresses rather the meticulousness of the African merchants there in the prompt settlement of their debts.191
That the trade nevertheless remained concentrated at Ouidah was in part due, as noted earlier, to the political history of the region, as this affected relations between Allada (and later Dahomey) in the interior and Ouidah and Jakin at the coast. But in addition, it seems likely that Ouidah’s continued dominance reflected in large part the forces of inertia. It is noteworthy that the pattern of concentration of the slave trade at a single port within the Bight of Benin is paralleled in other regions of western Africa, as for example the dominance of Bonny in the Bight of Biafra; and indeed it also mirrors the situation in Europe, where a single port was likewise commonly dominant within the slave trade of each European nation, for example Liverpool in England and Nantes in France. As a recent analysis co-authored by Eltis himself has suggested, this pattern of concentration probably reflects, in both Europe and Africa, cost savings arising from access to market information in established ports.192 On the Bight of Benin itself, on the European side of the trade, existing investment in the forts in Ouidah also operated to discourage relocation elsewhere.
Karl Polanyi linked the concentration of the slave trade at Ouidah to its status as a ‘port of trade’, which was politically ‘neutral’ and militarily ‘weak’, and therefore acceptable to traders of the different nationalities involved.193 This idea of a ‘neutral’ place of trade does, indeed, have considerable plausibility, not only in abstract theory but also in the documented history of this particular region: in the later eighteenth century, the lagoonside port of Abomey-Calavi, on the shore of Lake Nokoué, east of Ouidah, was described as a ‘neutral place’, which functioned as ‘a sort of free fair, where the different nations go to trade’.194 It is doubtful, however, whether this analysis has any bearing upon the rise of Ouidah as an Atlantic port in the late seventeenth century. Ouidah was indeed maintained by the Hueda kings as a ‘neutral’ port as regards traders of different European nations, as decreed in the treaty of 1703 forbidding hostilities among Europeans, and this policy was clearly among the factors that attracted European traders there: as the director of the French fort noted in 1716, it was ‘the only place of neutrality where the vessels of every nation are bound to find a secure retreat in time of [intra-European] war’.195 This, however, was a neutrality imposed upon Europeans by the strength of the Hueda state, rather than a reflection of the latter’s ‘weakness’; and Hueda was not in any sense recognized as a ‘neutral’ area by its African neighbours. Although Hueda was certainly a small and therefore relatively weak power in relation to the interior state of Allada, which was its principal supplier of slaves, its independence of Allada was sustained in the face of systematic opposition from the latter (including an actual military invasion in 1692), rather than accepted as serving its convenience.196
Eltis also observes that ‘the question of why, with all the income from its Atlantic trade and a significant military capacity, Whydah was unable to maintain its independence or, indeed, become a major power has yet to be addressed’, and suggests that this might indicate that ‘the transatlantic slave trade was not the central event shaping African economic and political developments’.197 This also seems an idiosyncratic reading of the literature. Hueda did, in fact, develop as a significant regional ‘power’ in the coastal area in the late seventeenth century, extending its authority at least briefly over Grand-Popo to the west and disputing control