The Old Calabar Slave Trade occupies a significant place in the history of Nigeria and the wider Atlantic world. From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, the communities along the Calabar River became an important point of exchange between Efik merchants, inland commercial networks and European slave ships operating in the Bight of Biafra. Historical scholarship supports an estimate of roughly 275,000 enslaved Africans exported through the Calabar and Cross River trade, a devastating human total, but far below claims that millions of people left Africa through Old Calabar alone.
Understanding this history requires a distinction between Old Calabar and the much larger Bight of Biafra. It also requires attention to African participation, European demand, Atlantic shipping and the inland networks through which captives were moved towards the coast.
What Old Calabar Actually Meant
Old Calabar was not simply another name for the geographical boundaries of modern Calabar. In the period of the Atlantic slave trade, the term referred to an Efik-dominated commercial and political complex centred on settlements along the Calabar River, including important communities such as Duke Town and Creek Town.
By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Efik merchants had become influential intermediaries between ships arriving from the Atlantic and trading networks extending deep into the interior.
Old Calabar formed part of the Bight of Biafra, a much larger historical slave-trading region. The Bight stretched far beyond Calabar and included other important embarkation centres, particularly Bonny.
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This distinction is essential because statistics for the entire Bight of Biafra are sometimes incorrectly presented as though they referred only to Calabar.
European commerce in the Bight was concentrated heavily at Old Calabar and Bonny. Old Calabar held an important position during the early eighteenth century, but by at least the 1740s Bonny had surpassed it as the region’s leading European trading centre.
Old Calabar Slave Trade and the 275,000 Estimate
Modern scholarship places the number of enslaved Africans exported through the Calabar and Cross River trade at approximately 275,000, broadly covering the period from about 1650 to the late 1830s.
The figure is a historical estimate reconstructed from surviving shipping records and archival evidence. Records of the Atlantic slave trade are substantial but incomplete.
Nevertheless, the estimate provides a more defensible picture of Old Calabar’s place in the Atlantic system than claims that several million enslaved Africans were shipped from Calabar itself.
For comparison, the transatlantic slave trade as a whole was enormously larger. The SlaveVoyages database estimates that approximately 12.52 million captive Africans departed Africa aboard transatlantic slave ships, with about 10.7 million surviving to reach destinations across the Atlantic.
Those figures cover African embarkation regions stretching across much of the continent’s Atlantic coastline over several centuries. They cannot be converted into figures for Old Calabar.
Antera Duke: An African Voice from Eighteenth-Century Calabar
One of the most remarkable sources for the history of Old Calabar was written by a participant in its commercial world.
Antera Duke, known in Efik as Ntiero Edem Efiom, was a prominent Efik merchant associated with Duke Town. His surviving diary contains entries dated from 18 January 1785 to 31 January 1788.
The manuscript is exceptional because so much surviving documentation about the Atlantic slave trade was produced by European ship captains, merchants, officials or missionaries. Antera Duke’s diary offers a rare written perspective from within an African trading society.
It records commercial transactions, visiting European ships, political disputes, social obligations, ceremonies and the activities of influential Efik merchants. It therefore provides evidence not only about slave trading but also about the wider political and commercial life of Old Calabar.
Antera Duke was not simply observing the trade. Earlier British commercial records demonstrate his direct participation.
Between 31 July 1769 and 10 January 1770, Antera supplied Captain John Potter with 50 enslaved people. Surviving records identify the goods exchanged in return and allow historians to reconstruct aspects of the commercial system in unusual detail.
Records concerning the Liverpool ships Dobson and Fox are even more revealing. Between 18 July 1769 and 12 January 1770, Efik traders sold 499 enslaved people to the vessels. The imported goods involved in such transactions included textiles, firearms, gunpowder, metal goods and other commodities valued in coastal and inland markets.
These records provide direct evidence of organised African participation in the trade.
The Inland Networks Behind the Calabar Trade
European slave ships arriving at Old Calabar did not obtain most of their captives by travelling deep into the African interior.
Instead, Efik merchants and other African intermediaries connected the coast with extensive inland commercial networks.
The commercial hinterland associated with Old Calabar has been described by historians as covering approximately 30,000 square miles. Routes extended westwards into Ibibio-speaking areas, northwards along the Cross River and eastwards towards regions approaching the Cameroon grasslands.
These routes carried much more than enslaved people.
Old Calabar merchants dealt in ivory, provisions, palm oil, pepper and other commodities, while imported European goods circulated in the opposite direction. Slave trading was therefore embedded within a much larger commercial system.
The breadth of these networks also explains why people exported through Old Calabar should not automatically be identified as Efik.
A person’s embarkation point was not necessarily that person’s birthplace or ethnic identity. Captives could originate far inland, pass through several markets or intermediaries and eventually arrive at the Calabar River for sale to Atlantic merchants.
The Efik were central commercial intermediaries, but the victims of the trade came from a much wider geographical and cultural area.
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African Agency and European Atlantic Power
The history of the Old Calabar Slave Trade becomes distorted when either African or European participation is removed from the story.
African rulers, merchants, brokers and other intermediaries participated in the capture, purchase, movement and sale of enslaved people. Efik merchants possessed considerable influence because they controlled access between European ships and inland networks.
Political authority and commercial reputation mattered. Credit was particularly important because Atlantic commerce frequently required merchants on different sides of the trading relationship to trust one another over extended periods.
Institutions such as Ekpe also occupied an important place in Old Calabar’s political and commercial society, including the regulation of obligations and the settlement of disputes.
African participation, however, does not turn the Atlantic slave trade into an exclusively African enterprise.
European merchants supplied ocean-going vessels, imported goods and substantial commercial capital. European shipowners and investors financed voyages. Plantation economies across the Americas created enormous demand for enslaved labour, while colonial legal systems transformed Africans and their descendants into legally recognised property.
British ports, particularly Liverpool and Bristol, became deeply involved in the eighteenth-century slave trade.
The system therefore depended upon connections between African suppliers and intermediaries, European merchants and financiers, Atlantic shipping and plantation societies in the Americas.
Removing any one of these components produces an incomplete history.
Who Profited and Who Paid the Price?
The economic gains generated by the trade were distributed among different participants.
Powerful African merchants could acquire imported merchandise, wealth, prestige and political influence. European merchants and shipowners pursued profits from slave voyages. Plantation owners gained access to coerced labour, while commercial economies on both sides of the Atlantic became connected to commodities produced by enslaved people.
For the enslaved, however, the system meant coercion rather than opportunity.
Captives could experience violent seizure, judicial or political enslavement, sale, family separation, forced journeys towards the coast, confinement aboard ships and the Middle Passage.
Those who survived transportation faced systems of compulsory labour and legal subordination in the Americas.
The commercial sophistication of Old Calabar should therefore never be mistaken for evidence that the system was benign. Human beings themselves became commodities within a profitable international trading structure.
Britain Abolishes Its Slave Trade
Britain’s role changed dramatically in the early nineteenth century.
The British Slave Trade Act received Royal Assent on 25 March 1807. The legislation prohibited new British slave-trading departures after 1 May 1807, while transitional arrangements allowed some vessels already legally cleared to complete voyages into 1808.
Britain’s withdrawal did not immediately end the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa.
Merchants operating under other national flags continued buying captives, and illegal trafficking persisted. Britain subsequently used the Royal Navy and diplomatic pressure in efforts to suppress the international trade.
In the Bight of Biafra, slave exports continued alongside a rapidly developing trade in palm oil and other products. Historical scholarship identifies 1841 as an important closing point for the region’s export slave trade, although Old Calabar’s slave exports had already declined considerably.
The change did not mean slavery itself immediately disappeared from the region. Enslaved labour continued within African societies, including in commercial production, even as overseas exports diminished.
Understanding the Scale of Calabar’s Slave Trade
Old Calabar was one embarkation complex within a much larger Atlantic system.
The Bight of Biafra was a major African embarkation region containing several slave-trading centres. West and West Central Africa contained numerous embarkation regions, while the transatlantic slave trade as a whole transported more than 12 million captive Africans across the Atlantic.
These geographical scales must be distinguished when discussing the history of Calabar.
Old Calabar was historically important without requiring numerical exaggeration. An estimated 275,000 exports represents a vast human tragedy in its own right.
Historical terminology also matters. Old Calabar, New Calabar and the Bight of Biafra did not describe the same geographical location. New Calabar referred to a different trading centre in the Niger Delta, associated historically with the Kalabari people, while Old Calabar lay along the Calabar River farther east.
Using these names interchangeably can create serious errors when interpreting slave-trade statistics.
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Conclusion
The Old Calabar Slave Trade was one of the major components of the Atlantic commercial system operating through the Bight of Biafra. Efik merchants built powerful connections between visiting European vessels and inland African markets, while extensive trading networks supplied captives and commodities from regions far beyond the immediate Calabar River settlements.
The surviving documentary record is unusually rich.
Antera Duke’s diary provides a rare African-written account of eighteenth-century Old Calabar. British trading records document his sale of 50 captives to Captain John Potter and the purchase of 499 enslaved people by the Liverpool vessels Dobson and Fox during the 1769 to 1770 trading season.
Approximately 275,000 enslaved Africans are estimated to have been exported through the Calabar and Cross River trade. Millions were transported from Africa during the wider transatlantic slave trade, but those continental and regional totals belong to a much broader historical geography.
The history is also more complex than narratives that assign responsibility exclusively to one side of the Atlantic.
African merchants and political authorities participated directly in enslavement and sale. European merchants provided ships, capital and overseas markets. Plantation economies across the Americas created immense demand for coerced labour.
Old Calabar stood at the intersection of these systems, and the people forced through them bore the overwhelming human cost.
Author’s Note
Old Calabar’s history demonstrates why the transatlantic slave trade must be understood as an interconnected system rather than through simplified narratives of a single guilty group or a single port. Efik commercial power, inland African trading networks, European capital and shipping, and plantation demand across the Americas all contributed to a system that converted human beings into commodities. Recognising African participation does not diminish European responsibility, just as acknowledging European demand does not erase the actions of African merchants and political authorities. The estimated 275,000 people exported through the Calabar and Cross River trade represent hundreds of thousands of individual lives disrupted by enslavement, forced migration and Atlantic commerce.
References
Stephen D. Behrendt, A. J. H. Latham and David Northrup, eds., The Diary of Antera Duke: An Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader. Oxford University Press, 2010.
A. J. H. Latham, Old Calabar, 1600–1891: The Impact of the International Economy upon a Traditional Society. Clarendon Press, 1973.
Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 2, 1999, pp. 332–355.
Ugo G. Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
David Lishilinimle Imbua, “Slavery and Slave Trade Remembered: A Study of the Slave History Museum in Calabar, Nigeria”, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, Vol. 22, 2013.
Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “From Slaves to Palm Oil: Afro-European Commercial Relations in the Bight of Biafra, 1741–1841”, in David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby, eds., Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century. Boydell & Brewer, 2004, pp. 13–29.
SlaveVoyages, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and Estimates.
UK Parliament, historical records relating to the abolition of the British slave trade and the Slave Trade Act of 1807.
