| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Randy J. Sparks. The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. 189. $22.00.
In 1767, English slave traders carried out a well-planned attack on one of the leading trading wards in Old Calabar, a major trading port in the Bight of Biafra (southeastern Nigeria). Although well known to students of the Atlantic slave trade from southeastern Nigeria, hitherto no detailed narrative of this event, which involved the slaughtering of hundreds of Old Calabar's merchant princes and their servants and the export of others to the Americas, has existed in the scholarly literature. Randy J. Sparks presents an engaging narrative of that event in his book. The excellently written and captivating story centers on two members of a Calabar's ruling family, who were captured by the English traders during the attack and sold into slavery in the Americas. The narrative, constructed from the letters of the enslaved princes and other archival sources, is placed appropriately in the broader context of the transatlantic slave trade and British abolition.	1
The story begins with commercial rivalry among the merchant princes of three wards—Creek Town, Old Town, and New Town—in the southeastern Nigerian port of Calabar. The English traders, who found the merchant princes of Old Town difficult to deal with, exploited the rivalry to destroy them. Pretending arbitration in a long-standing quarrel between Old Town and New Town, the captains of English slave ships in Calabar in 1767 invited the king of Old Town and his people for an overnight entertainment on their ships as a prelude to a peace parley with the king of New Town and his people, who would arrive the following morning. The king, eager to settle the quarrel, accepted the invitation and arrived with a large entourage comprising members of Old Town's ruling families and their servants. But instead of a peace parley, they were attacked and, as Sparks puts it, "massacred." In all, 400 were killed and others were shipped to the Americas and sold into slavery, including the king's brother and his nephew, the two princes. The story continues with a series of successful escapes by the princes and further experiences of treachery by other English captains, including a final one in Bristol before the princes secured the help of one of the port's leading slave traders, Thomas Jones, whose ships traded heavily in Calabar. They finally arrived back home in 1774, after about eight years.	. . .

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