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Direct answers to the questions readers actually ask, including the uncomfortable ones about human sacrifice, the slave trade, initiation, appropriation and faith.

Captured as a boy at Òṣogun and sold three times in a day, he became the first African Anglican bishop, wrote the first serious Yoruba grammar and dictionary, translated the Bible into Yoruba, and was broken at the end of his life by younger European missionaries.

The town that replaced Ọ̀yọ́ as the dominant Yoruba power, the achieved-title constitution that let a farmer or an Ifá priest rise to command it, and the men who did.

The most powerful women in nineteenth-century Yorubaland, both of them large-scale slave traders, one killed by the ruler she had armed and the other exiled by a British consul, and the political office that made their power constitutional.

What the century of wars did to Yoruba women: as captives and ransomed persons, as provisioners and arms dealers, as slaveholders and traders, as returnees building a new elite, and what it did to their position overall.

How nineteenth-century Yoruba warfare remade society, through refugee city-founding, the economics of captive and pawn labour, the Ajele resident-administrator system, and new patterns of stratification and gender.

An examination of Yoruba women during nineteenth-century warfare as military financiers, logisticians, captives, slaveholders, and political leaders under changing militarized state structures.

Twenty-two Yorùbá proverbs on the enslaved person, the debt-pawn, and the freeborn, and on what the proverb tradition says a person in bondage is owed, denied, and worth.

The life, political career, economic empire, and contested death of the nineteenth-century merchant who became the second Iyalode of Ibadan.

A historical analysis of Madam Ẹfúnpọ̀róyè Ọ̀ṣúntinúbú, examining her career as a nineteenth-century merchant magnate, political kingmaker in Lagos and Abeokuta, and first Iyalode of Egbaland.

An examination of Yoruba domestic servitude, the iwofa debt-pawnship system, internal legal categories, and the complex impacts of nineteenth-century wars and colonial abolition.