Maintaining the boundary: the archaeology of the Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom’s discovery of the British Empire

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Late 19th century British colonial authorities in Lagos sought to extend imperial hegemony over the Yorùbá kingdoms to the north as part of ongoing efforts to control trade in the interior of what is now Nigeria. The Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom’s “middleman” position made it important to regional trade, and it was careful to control and monitor movement and trade via a series of trading posts, markets, and toll gates established on its frontiers. These policies inconvenienced the British, culminating in the violent conquest of Ìjẹ̀bú in 1892. This paper investigates the nature of this changing relationship between the Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom and the British Empire, drawing upon archaeological and ethnographic data from sites adjacent to Sungbo’s Eredo – a massive Ìjẹ̀bú monumental earthwork (and potentially Africa’s largest single monument) – to understand how the Ìjẹ̀bú conceptualized, maintained, controlled, and responded to these evolving engagements according to their own indigenous logics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation

Keywords

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Contact(s): Nicole Haddow