study of Ijebu society in the 1950s and 1960s, Olabiyi Yai and Femi Ade Ojo in the 1960s to the 2000s, and Aderivaldo Ramos de Santana, who have analyzed materials from French and Brazilian archives. Finally, I have spent over two decades studying the subject and have visited many of the places he mentioned to better understand him. ${ }^{1}$  
Until the eighteenth century, Oyo kingdom was the most powerful Yoruba state. Oyo's strength rested on her size and revenue base, a substantial part of which derived from the slave trade. By the middle of the century, however, Oyo began to decline due to a combination of internal troubles and pressure from its neighbors. For instance, in the seventeenth century Oyo had sold enslaved people through the ports of Ouidah and Porto Novo, both on the Slave Coast. But, in the 1720s, the sudden rise of Dahomey, Oyo's western neighbor and a former vassal, gradually cut off access to these ports. By the 1770s Yoruba traders had relocated eastward to Badagry and, in the 1790s, to Lagos.  
The rise of Lagos coupled with new political realities in Central Sudan and northern Yorubaland also redirected trade away from the Oyo heartland into non-Oyo towns. One of the new routes from Central Sudan passed through Ilorin and Owu/Ife to Ijebu lagoon port towns such as Ikorodu and Ikosi from where traders sailed on the lagoon to Lagos or the Niger Delta. ${ }^{2}$ With Lagos becoming the most important slave port in West Africa it drew Yorubaland intimately into the slave trade. ${ }^{3}$ It spread the frontiers of slavery deeper into Yorubaland and the violence associated with slaving operations. The major market on this route was Apomu, an Ife town where enslaved people were sold to Ijebu traders for cowries, foodstuffs, textiles, and after 1820, firearms. ${ }^{4}$ Almost immediately competition for the control of the Apomu began among surrounding states: Ife, Owu, Ijebu, Egba, and Oyo, leading to two wars, the  
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