A unique register
The Atlantic trade archives are overwhelmingly European. The Grand Livre des Lawson reverses this perspective. Here, it is the Guin merchants who keep the accounts — recording ship arrivals and departures, negotiated prices, matrimonial alliances, and visits by foreign dignitaries. The register covers Aneho's most tumultuous period: the end of the slave trade, the transition to legitimate commerce, the arrival of missionaries, the German protectorate, World War I, and the French mandate.
Contents of the manuscript
The original consists of several bound notebooks totaling hundreds of pages. Entries are dated, often daily. Contents include ship movements, commercial transactions, diplomatic correspondence, family events, and visits by personalities. The main language is Victorian English, reflecting the family's Anglophile orientation, but Mina appears regularly in personal notes. This linguistic alternation testifies to the cultural hybridity of 19th-century West African coastal elites.
The Oxford publication
In 2005, historians Adam Jones and Peter Sebald published An African Family Archive: The Lawsons of Little Popo/Aneho (Togo) 1841-1938 through Oxford University Press — a critical edition with explanatory notes, maps, genealogical trees and a substantial historical introduction. A French edition exists through L'Harmattan in two volumes. For the first time, an African document of this scope was made accessible to researchers worldwide.