Capitalism in the Colonies: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1931.A. G.Hopkins, (Princeton University Press, 2024. Pp. 576. ISBN 9780691258843. Hbk £42.00)

This sizeable and meticulously researched monograph opens up aspects of African economic and business history through its tight focus on the Lagos business community across three distinct eras that few works in the field have hitherto examined.Capitalism in the Colonies provides a capstone to decades of detailed archival and oral history research in the field and draws on an unprecedentedly rich set of files.A prosopographical study of over 100 Lagosian entrepreneurs (116 to be exact) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it brings into sharp focus the economic upheavals of the Nigerian port, from the transition towards so-called legitimate commerce at the end of the slave trade in West Africa to the start of the First World War in 1914.Since its publication in 2024, there have been many reviews of the book, and they offer further insights into what it affords over its more than 500 pages.Importantly, the New Books Network feature an interview with the author about the book (https://newbooksnetwork.com/ capitalism-in-the-colonies), and the H-Diplo Roundtable article combines reviews by some of the leading scholars in the field (https://networks.h-net.org/group/discussions/20123374/h-diploroundtable-xxvii-1-hopkins-capitalism-colonies).They do so at greater length than this short review and delve into the many aspects of this book.The structure is set around three 'shocks' that reconfigured the commercial environment: 1851 (naval intervention and the turn to 'legitimate commerce'), 1892 (the British invasion of Ijebu inland as part of the wider 'scramble for Africa'), and 1914.Hopkins's core thesis is that, despite colonial constraints and competition from expatriate firms, Lagos's African merchants were the key innovators who introduced and spread the institutions and practices of capitalism: limited liability, freehold property, wage labour, and a diversified financial sector.In this, Hopkins directly engages a half-century of debate, from Walter Rodney's classic indictment of colonialism's underdevelopment effects to the more variegated literature on African entrepreneurship since Polly Hill and the newer political economy of factor markets.It does so on the basis of rich archival and oral history sources, which exemplifies the importance of triangulating historical records from many different places, not all of them archival in the traditional sense.