This article is a partial answer to M. D. D. Newitt, who proposed that settled Maravi states were established only as a result of the rise of Muzura in the first half of the seventeenth century (cf. J. Afr. Hist., 1982, ii). Newitt thereby challenged the more orthodox view that a formal Maravi state system existed already by the middle of the sixteenth century, if not earlier. It is argued here that the orthodox view is still valid in the case of the Lundu state in the lower Shire valley, and perhaps also in the case of some of the neighbouring states. It is shown that around 1590 the then Lundu incumbent embarked on a course of strong state centralisation during which he appropriated the power of the traditional rain priests and thus became both the secular and the ritual leader of the country. It is also argued that this unusual degree of centralisation was achieved and could for a time be maintained with the help of the Zimba, an army of fugitives from the south bank of the Zambezi. However, the present article challenges Malawian historiographical orthodoxy on a very different point, by maintaining that Muzura is not to be identified with the Kalonga dynasty on the south-western shores of Lake Malawi, but with a separate state system in the western Shire Highlands, which gained prominence well before the Kalongas came to the fore.

During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, European merchants bought more slaves in the Bight of Benin than on any other part of the West African coast. From c. 1720 until 1727 much of their buying was concentrated in Savi, the capital of a small Aja state called Whydah. When the Dahomeans overran Savi in 1727 they stopped the inland slave suppliers from travelling to the coast, prevented the local Hueda from going inland to collect slaves, and insisted that the Europeans bought slaves only from Dahomean dealers. In an attempt to make sure that the Europeans had nothing more to do with their former trading partners the Dahomeans burned the factories in Savi and forced their European occupants to retire to Grehue, Savi's port, a spot on the coast where the Europeans maintained a number of fortified warehouses.

The middleman policy did not at first operate satisfactorily. There were two reasons for this. The first was that the Dahomeans were, in practice, unable to prevent the Europeans from continuing to trade with the Hueda. The second was that the inland suppliers refused to sell slaves to Savi's conquerors. The Dahomeans solved their ‘coastal’ problem in the 1740S by placing a garrison in Grehue. This garrison kept the exiled Hueda at bay and held the Europeans in what amounted to open captivity. The Dahomeans were never able completely to solve their ‘supply’ problem. In the 1730s and 1740S the inland merchants took their slaves to ports which opened up on the Bight to the east of Grehue. Only in the 1750s and 1760s did they channel substantial numbers of slaves through Dahomey. In the last decades of the century they again boycotted the Dahomean market. Dahomey therefore prospered as a middleman state only between c. 1748 and c. 1770.

An examination of their eighteenth century trading suggests that the Dahomeans were a slave-raiding community whose members realised in 1727 that they would soon run out of fresh raiding grounds. They appear to have introduced their middleman policy in an attempt to ensure that they would continue to profit from slave trading even after they had ceased to be able to take large numbers of captives themselves. Although the policy was by no means a complete success, it was important in that it seems to have led the Dahomeans to begin placing garrisons in the territories they ravaged. It appears, in fact, to have been the pursuit of their middleman goals that led them to begin creating the often described nineteenth century ‘greater’ Dahomean state. The middleman programme ceased to be of much importance after c. 1818, when the fall of Oyo enabled the Dahomeans to resume raiding widely in unexploited territory.

The European goods which Africans consumed in the slave trade era tell us much about the African societies which imported them. However the study of the subject has involved much confusion through the application of fragmentary evidence from different societies in different stages of development towards the fashioning of broad hypotheses about the impact of the trade on West Africa as a whole. It is important therefore, when the evidence is available, to study each society and each group of African middlemen individually as well as within the wider context.

The papers (especially the barter records) of Richard Miles throw a good deal of light on one such microcosm: the Akan people of the Gold Coast in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Fante middlemen with whom Miles dealt required, for virtually every barter, an assortment of goods from five major categories: hardware, currencies, textiles, luxury items, arms and ammunition. Though all these categories were necessary for the trade, it is notable that textiles were far and away the dominant commodity desired by the Akan. Guns were in surprisingly low demand during this period which suggests that the Akan slave producers (principally the Asante) had no difficulty raising slaves through tribute in peacetime and were not forced to rely on wars and slave-raids.

Miles's documents also make it clear that generalizations drawn from the Gold Coast in this period cannot be extended automatically to other areas; Akan history tells us that neither can they be extended on the Gold Coast into a different era.

Traditionally, historians have viewed Queen Ranavalona I as being responsible for inaugurating an autarkic policy in Madagascar. Her expulsion of most foreigners from the country in 1835 is seen primarily as a reflection of her conservative and xenophobic attitudes. In this she is contrasted with her predecessor, Radama I, who is viewed as an enlightened and progressive monarch who, through wise domestic policies and an alliance with the British on Mauritius from 1817, built up an economically sound and prosperous empire. This paper challenges the traditional interpretation, arguing that in fact the Merina economy was in a dire condition from the second decade of the nineteenth century because the slave exports upon which it heavily depended were severely restricted in consequence of the British takeover of the Mascarenes. The subsequent alliance between Britain and Imerina totally prohibited slave exports. However, Radama I looked to Mauritius and British aid to promote legitimate exports and to help impose Merina rule over all Madagascar. Autarkic policies were initiated by Radama I in 1825–6 as a reaction against the failure of the British alliance to produce the anticipated results, and against the free trade imperialism that accompanied it. Convinced by 1825 that the Mauritius government meant to subordinate Imerina both economically and politically to British imperial interests, he reneged on the British treaty and adopted a policy designed to promote rapid economic growth within an independent island empire. Ranavalona I, far from implementing irrational and xenophobic policies, extended her predecessor's autarkic policies in a rational and systematic manner, and for precisely the same ends.

Despite the evident importance of fishing in Malawi, its role in the territorial colonial economy has been largely ignored. This paper focuses on the evolution of fishing and fish-trading at the south end of Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi), emphasising the interaction between ecological change and changes in market opportunity. During the late nineteenth century, fishing played an important role in the economy of the Mang'anja people alongside agricultural production. Communual tasks such as the setting of nets or building of canoes were conducted by male members of an mbumba or matrilineage group who traded fish with the agriculturally productive highland regions nearby in exchange for maize and beans. Little changed initially with the estalishment of colonial rule, though some labour previously employed in fishing may have been diverted into cotton-growing which the Government encouraged in the Upper Shire Valley. The establishment of military camps during the First World War, combined with the sudden drying up of Lake Chilwa, the major source of fish in the Shire Highlands, created the opportunity for enterprising fishermen to start a regular trade in dried fish to Blantyre and Zomba from about 1917. This was stimulated in the 1920s by the steady rise of water levels on the Shire River which brought cotton production virtually to a halt making fishing an attractive alternative.

The advent in the 1930s of non-African commercial fishermen who used lorries to transport fresh fish to Blantyre and dried fish to Salisbury did not prevent a further expansion of African fishing and fish-trading, many of the traders using bicycles to extend their sales into the southern Malawian hinterland. Officials tended to side with African fishermen when their interests clashed with those of incomers, notably the Greek Yiannakis brothers. But they had little success in introducing new techniques to improve productivity and fell back in the 1950s On the prohibition of exports to the Rhodesias, a policy aimed at ensuring a regular supply of fish to workers on European estates within Malawi.

By the 1950s, European companies were recorded as being responsible for over half the fish caught in Malawi. African fishing had been affected by the emergence of a small group of capitalist entrepreneurs, most of them former labour migrants, who had invested their savings in imported nets and boats and employed labour on a regular basis. Mang'anja fishermen now faced competition from Tonga migrants using new technical and organisational methods. In contrast to under-development sterotypes, the indigenous industry continued to expand, with migrant workers playing an important role in the development of fishing.