Kristin Mann

Kristin Mann, Professor, (B. A., 1968; M. A., 1970; Ph.D., 1977; Stanford University); eighteenth through twentieth-century African social and economic history; history of gender, marriage, and the family; of slavery, emancipation, and the slave trade; of colonial political and legal changes; and of West African commercial and agricultural transformations. Author of Marrying Well: Marriage, Status, and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos; co-editor, Law in Colonial Africa; and Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil.

My most recent book, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900, examines the impact of long-term changes in the economy and culture of the Atlantic world on the eastern Slave Coast of West Africa. The book investigates the causes and consequences of the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade and the later transition to the European palm produce trade on the town of Lagos, during the era that it developed into a major Atlantic port and British colonial capital. Changes in the organization of labor lie at the heart of the story, from the growth and development of local slavery in the era of the slave trade to the new forms of unfree labor that emerged in place of a free labor market in the era of emancipation. Gender remains central to my concerns, because female and male slaves had quite different experiences during the transition. I also remain interested in legal and institutional changes in the era of British colonialism.

Curriculum Vitae