LAGOS, ABEOKUTA – NIGERIA / TRADE: Memorie di Giambattista Scala Console di S. M. Italiana in Lagos di Guinéa intorno ad un suo viaggio in Abbeockuta citta’ nell’ interno dell’ Africa fatto nell’anno 1858

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LAGOS, ABEOKUTA – NIGERIA / TRADE: Memorie di Giambattista Scala Console di S. M. Italiana in Lagos di Guinéa intorno ad un suo viaggio in Abbeockuta citta’ nell’ interno dell’ Africa fatto nell’anno 1858

1,400.00€

Giambattista SCALA (1817-1871).

[Memoirs of Giambattista Scala Consul of Her Majesty of Italy in Lagos di Guinéa about his trip to Abbeockuta, a city in the interior of Africa made in the year 1858]

Sampierdarena, today a part of Genoa: Francesco Vernengo 1862.

8º, [4 pp.] blank and title, 243 pp., 5 pp., contemporary black linen boards and black goat spine with gold tooling and lettering, marbled endpapers (minor staining and foxing, binding little scuffed on the edges).

Memories of Giambattista Scala, the Sardinian consul in Lagos, Nigeria, along with his travelogue to Abeokuta, located north of Lagos, depict the region at the end of the slave trade. During this period, merchants with new goods, Scala among them, began to move into the area.

With a dedication by the author.

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Description

Giambattista Scala, born in 1817 in Chiavari, Italy, described himself as the first legitimate trader to reach Lagos after the abolition of the slave trade and following the bombardment of Lagos in late 1851. The new treaty between Lagos and Great Britain, signed on January 1, 1852, abolished the slave trade and human sacrifice, leaving Lagos in desperate need of legitimate trade goods. This shift was encouraged by British missionaries, although clandestine slave trading still persisted.

Until 1859, when Scala returned to Italy for health reasons, he developed a successful business in Lagos and what was then considered the interior of Nigeria, specifically in Abeokuta. Since 1856, he had served as the Consul or Consul General of the Kingdom of Sardinia and was involved in diplomacy related to Britain.

In his memoirs, Scala describes both the country and the political situation he witnessed, in which he claims to have been personally involved, although his text contains several inaccuracies and depicts some situations as overly dramatic.

Scala was a shipbuilder in Italy and died in late 1871 due to a disease he contracted in Africa years earlier.

The book was published in 1862, a year after Britain annexed Lagos as a crown colony through the Lagos Treaty of Cession. The author dedicated the example on the first blank page to Giovanni Podestà in Lavagna, Italy, on November 9, 1871, shortly before his death .
We could only trace one example outside the Italian institutions, housed by the University Erfurt – FB Gotha: Sondermagazin Perthesforum.

References: OCLC 685221320. Cf.: Smith, Robert. “GIAMBATTISTA SCALA: ADVENTURER, TRADER AND FIRST ITALIAN REPRESENTATIVE IN NIGERIA.” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, vol. 7, no. 1, 1973, pp. 67–76. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41856985. Accessed 15 Feb. 2025; Morelli, Stefania. “GIAMBATTISTA SCALA, CONSOLE PER SE STESSO. Il Regno Di Sardegna e l’Africa Occidentale Nel Periodo Preunitario.” Africa: Rivista Trimestrale Di Studi e Documentazione Dell’Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, vol. 58, no. 3/4, 2003, pp. 356–71. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40761708. Accessed 15 Feb. 2025.

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