There is a general consensus among West African historians that the Island of Gold, known to Arab geographers as Wangara and to European cartographers as Palolus, refers to the Bambuk/Bure goldfields. This article examines the evidence for an alternative identification of the Island of Gold with the Inland Niger Delta, where the place name Wangara would be derived from Soninke long-distance traders (Wangara). Many of the details on the Island of Gold provided in the original sources can be shown to apply more convincingly to the Inland Niger Delta than to Bambuk/Bure. Until now, this hypothesis has not received serious consideration, partly because of the belief that the Inland Delta and its most important entrepot, Jenne, did not play a significant role in long-distance trade networks until the fourteenth century. This is contradicted by archaeological evidence for a major urban centre at Jenne-jeno by 900 a.d.

The existence in the later first millennium a.d. of the Soninke town of Jenne-jeno, and the oral traditions which maintain that the western Inland Delta was the heartland of the Soninke trade diaspora, combine to indicate that commerce along the Middle Niger was substantial by the early second millennium. Indirect confirmation of this trading activity is found both in al-Bakri's discussion of riverine trade routes along the upper Niger Bend and in al-Idrisi's account of the Wangara along the Middle Niger. The continuing identification of the Inland Niger Delta region as the Island of Gold from the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries implies that part of this trade involved gold. A possible early gold source in Lobi is suggested.

The Vai of northwestern Liberia speak a Northern Mande language, fairly closely related to Manding. Previous attempts to date the breakaway of the Vai from their Manding homeland have been unconvincing. The most we can say is that they probably reached the coast more than 500 years ago. The leaders of the Mani or Kquoja invasion of Sierra Leone in the mid-sixteenth century almost certainly spoke a contemporary version of Vai.

There is little evidence of a direct connexion between the movement of the Vai towards the coast and that of the Ligbi towards eastern Ivory Coast, despite linguistic similarities. More probably the Vai entered present-day Sierra Leone in company with the Kono. Traditions that the Kono were ‘left behind’ sound misleading: it is more likely that the Kono, Vai and speakers of the now extinct ‘ Dama’ language formed a continuous band from eastern Sierra Leone to the sea, cutting off the Gola and Kisi from other Mel speakers. Later (perhaps before the mid-seventeenth century) this band must have been split by the westward movement of Southwestern Mande speakers.

The ‘migration’ of the Vai need not have involved a mass exodus or conquest. What was probably involved was the gradual creation of trade corridors, with a few Northern Mande speakers resident on the coast and a large number carrying salt, dried fish and other wares from the coast towards the head of the Niger. Although the corridors were eventually to some extent disrupted, the Vai language survived near the coast, because of its importance in trade and because links with the Manding were never entirely severed.

Archaeological evidence and historical accounts have been used to examine the impact of trade and ecology on the decline of West African iron industries. Environmental changes including an increasingly desiccating climatic shift and widespread deforestation as a direct result of fuel procurement over centuries of iron-smelting and European coastal exploitation, seriously affected the survivability of these industries. While the increasing importation of European iron bars and other manufactured goods necessitated a certain amount of technological innovation, the only viable long-term response and adaptation to the ecological devastation became the increased reliance on imported supplies of iron.

Joseph Miller has argued that the ‘Jaga’ invasion of Kongo in 1568 was primarily an internal rebellion supported by people from Matamba or from Makoko and the Pool. In this article I suggest that the Jaga were more probably dislocated Kongo or Tio from the lower middle Kwango. They were the ancestors of the seventeenth-century ‘Muyaka’, who raided slaves for the Makoko market. Their invasion of Kongo probably began as slave raiding. It continued as an attempt to break the Makoko king's monopoly of slave trade outlets by gaining direct access to the European traders. The invaders succeeded in temporarily overthrowing Kongo for two reasons. Firstly, Kongo was generally ill adapted to withstand sudden invasion. Secondly, the Kongo ruling elite was divided while undergoing radical political and social change. The restoration of Kongo by Portuguese forces had two important consequences. Firstly, it confirmed and advanced the changes in the ruling elite which had begun in the early sixteenth century; it thereby laid the foundation for a monopoly of the throne by a slave-based patrilineal royal segment descended from Afonso I. Secondly, the restoration facilitated the development of a new cloth-trade route from Okango through São Salvador to Luanda which compensated the mani Kongo for his loss of coastal monopoly on slave exports. This new trade enabled Kongo to suvive economically and politically into the later seventeenth century.

The distinguishing feature of the Malagasy slave trade in the nineteenth century was the co-existence of two competitive slave networks, the one feeding Malagasy slaves to meet the demand of long-distance and regional markets in the western Indian Ocean, and the other channelling Malagasy war captives and East African slaves on to the markets of Imerina. The export of slaves from Madagascar had long existed, but the import of slaves was a new and distinctly nineteenth-century phenomenon, the result of the rise of the Merina empire, whose economy was based on a huge, unremunerated and servile labour force. As the empire expanded, so its labour requirements grew, to conflict sharply with the increasing demand for labour on the neighbouring plantation islands as they shifted over to the production of sugar. Creole merchants found themselves obliged to find alternative labour supplies, and from the 1830s they were moving rapidly down the west coast of Madagascar, where they purchased slaves from chiefs independent of Merina control. Until the outbreak of the Franco-Merina war of 1882–5, the slave-trade networks remained remarkably stable, despite local rivalries. This was due largely to the presence of the Arab Antalaotra, an experienced body of middlemen, and the Indian Karany who supplied the capital for the trade. The war effectively broke the power of the Merina regime, and as the imperial economy crumbled, so security of trade collapsed across the island. Though the disruption of legitimate commerce initially spurred the slave trade, it also strengthened creole calls for French intervention. This occurred in 1895, and the following year the French authorities abolished slavery in Madagascar. This, and the effective military occupation of the island by the French, reduced the Malagasy slave trade to a trickle by the first years of the twentieth century.

This paper traces the formation, growth, and contraction of the Bron Confederation, a group of small provinces which seceded from Asante in 1875 and remained independent until British and German acquisition in the mid-1890s. The Confederation was headed by the priest of a traditional religious shrine called Dente. The paper analyses how, operating initially from a solely religious base, the Dente priest achieved real political power over the Confederation. He became increasingly threatening to Asante and entwined in Asante politics, ultimately coming to the attention of European officials. His nemesis lay in the fact that neither Asante nor European strategists could afford to tolerate a successful Bron Confederation. Nevertheless the Confederation coalesced under his leadership and his ultimate authority was religious. A case study in the process of pre-colonial African religious/political synthesis, this paper specifically proposes that the sanctions resulting from religious oath-swearing and the wealth accruing from religious consultation were managed skilfully by the Dente priest and provided the basis for secular economic and political power.

During the period of the European Scramble for Africa, many African rulers, conscious of the military superiority of the European Powers, resorted to the use of diplomacy in a desperate but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to maintain the independence of their dominions. This approach was demonstrated in Futa Jallon's resistance to French expansion.

Among the methods of resistance used by the Alimamies of Futa were the rejection of the European version and interpretation of treaties, the grant of support to other African resistance movements, and the exploitation of Anglo-French rivalry. The Alimamies also exploited the lack of unity in French administrative organization in West Africa and the complexity of Futa's political constitution. Their resistance, marked by a considerable degree of duplicity, was facilitated by France's dependence on a policy of peaceful expansion towards Futa in contrast to its aggressive approach in many other areas of West Africa. Eventually, Fula resistance collapsed, largely because of the disintegration of the indigenous state, which enabled France to intervene and establish its authority over Futa with remarkable ease, using only a minimum of force.

During the classical period of colonialism, from the 1890s to the 1940s, much private Western investment in Africa was conducted through investment waves – short-lived booms related to demands for, and prices of, particular raw materials. One such burst of foreign financial interest occurred between 1905 and 1914 when, against the background of a climacteric in tropical rubber, 55 companies with a total nominal capital of £5 9 million were floated in Britain to undertake rubber production in Africa. The article, seeking to understand why British capital, largely responsible for the dramatic growth of rubber planting in Asia, made such little lasting impact in Africa, focuses upon the 26 companies set up for West African operations. It notes their high failure rate, which was related to the predominance of interest in wild rather than planted rubber.

Two principal reasons are adduced for the lack of commercial success of the 18 companies exploiting wild rubber concessions. The first, political and commercial opposition aroused by the exercise of monopoly rights over a natural forest product, is illustrated by the experience of three relatively large concerns in Liberia and the Ivory Coast. The second, an inadequate financial and managerial structure, is most obvious among companies with assets in the Gold Coast and Southern Nigeria, mainly fraudulent or near-fraudulent concerns floated to feed speculation in rubber shares during 1909–10. Their promotion involved the shadier fringes of the Edwardian capital market and was connected to the Gold Coast mining shares boom of 1900–1. These businesses made almost no contribution to the West African rubber trade.