Material Life and Domestic Economy in a Frontier of the Oyo Empire During the Mid-Atlantic Age

The Mid- Atlantic Age1 was a period of an integrated commercial system in the Atlantic Basin that linked most parts of Western Europe, the Americas, the Indian Ocean littorals, and much of West and Central Africa. Spanning the seventeenth through, at least, the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the period was characterized by a dramatic increase in the volume of commerce at the regional and global levels.2 Market economies soared in the second half of the seventeenth century, with the Western African portion of that integrated commerce dominated by the export of African captives in the Atlantic Slave Trade.3 The historiography of Mid-Atlantic Age Africa …