My recent monograph deals with the development, over a period of 300 years, of Afro-European trade, mainly in slaves but also in ivory and agricultural products, in what are today coastal Togo and parts of Bénin and Ghana. It comprises a detailed reconstruction of the political and social history of two states, the kingdom of Ge (Gen/ Genyi/ Guin) and the kingdom of the Hula, known to Europeans as Little Popo and Great Popo respectively. Central issues include state building, the relationship between war and the slave trade, and the role of Africans in a globalising world. (For further details and to order the book, see https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781847011787/afro-european-trade-in-the-atlantic-world/
Another research interest is the production of knowledge about Africa. My MA dissertation examined the portrayal of Africa in the works of the British writer Sarah Bowdich/ Lee. I have also examined the British navy’s surveys of the African coast in the mid-nineteenth century. My ideas were presented in the Annual Lecture of the Hakluyt Society in June 2015.
My interest in biographical approaches has led to several workshops resulting in co-edited special issues of the Journal of Southern African Studies (2012) and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies (October 2016, republ. in 2018 as a book: see https://www.routledge.com/Biographies-Between-Spheres-of-Empire-Life-History-Approaches-to-Colonial/Oppen-Strickrodt/p/book/9780367892579). I attach special importance to the retrieval of African ‘voices’ from European documents. Thus, in my article ‘Aballow’s Story’ (2013) I use judicial records to reconstruct the experiences of an enslaved woman on the nineteenth-century Gold and Slave Coasts: https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/african-history/african-voices-slavery-and-slave-trade-volume-1?format=PB