1622 to 1807 · Africanspan
Efik houses at Old Calabar control who is sold and to whom
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Old Calabar stands on the estuaries near the modern border of Nigeria and Cameroon, and by the middle of the seventeenth century it was one of the leading ports of the Bight of Biafra. The business there was organised by Efik trading houses, resident family firms that controlled credit, the inland routes and the supply of captives coming down them. European captains did not go upriver and did not buy in the interior. They anchored, dealt with the houses, waited on the houses, and took what the houses delivered on the terms the houses set. British ships from London, Bristol and Liverpool carried the largest share of that traffic until the abolition act of 1807, which is why most people shipped out of Old Calabar ended up in the British colonies of the Caribbean and North America. The Atlantic trade needed partners on both shores. At Old Calabar the African partners held the local advantage, and they used it.
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