| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey. By Randy J. Sparks. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 189 pp. $22.00, ISBN 0-674-01312-3.)

In this fascinating account, Randy J. Sparks sweeps the reader from the slave ports of Old Calabar to the colonies of Dominica and Virginia, then on to Britain, before finally returning to West Africa. His narrative is as engaging as his canvas is broad. What makes his story all the more remarkable is that it recounts the adventures, not of European explorers, but of two enslaved Africans. Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John were members of the ruling slave-trading family of Old Town in Old Calabar. There they enjoyed the trappings of an elite life-style and reveled in the wealth and position the slave trade brought them. But wealth brought tensions, and the men were captured during a brutal massacre that their New Town rivals and European traders connived at. Their enslavement and subsequent attempts to free themselves form the core of the narrative. Around it, Sparks discusses the complex systems of trade and slavery in Africa and the vital interpersonal mercantile relationships between Europeans and Africans. He assesses the impact of the trade on African economies and societies and shows how new mercantile elites emerged to challenge, and then to supersede, traditional leaders. He goes on to outline the terrible conditions of the middle passage before describing the men's arrival in Britain. Sparks discusses their legal quests in the aftermath of the Somerset case and their conversion to Methodism, which involved Charles and John Wesley, no less.

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