1659 to 1807 · Africanspan
Bonny rose with Liverpool and with the Aro trading network
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Bonny and New Calabar lie close together in the eastern Niger delta and were politically separate, each governed by its own trading houses and answerable to nobody in the other. Both were central to the British slave trade. Bonny grew the faster of the two, and the reason was its connection to the Aro, an Igbo network of traders and warriors whose oracle and reputation gave them standing across a wide territory inland and let them move captives to the coast in numbers no European could have organised. Between 1760 and 1810 that supply made the Bight of Biafra the second largest source region for people shipped to the Americas. The rise of Bonny ran in parallel with the rise of Liverpool, and the pairing let Liverpool ships take command of the market in the British Caribbean. Two ports on opposite sides of an ocean grew on each other, and neither of them was the capital of anything.
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