SUMMARY
As a history of inter-group relations among the Benin and her Urhobo and Asaba neighbours of south-south region of Nigeria up 1990, what has been attempted here is really a survey of their inter-group contact. The available findings in this study support the detailed history of their socio-economic and political relations in the pre-colonial time. It is however, important to draw attention once again to a few aspects of this survey. Firstly, it is clear that the unit of operations among the Benin and her Urhobo and Asaba neighbours were very small.
For most of them the clan was the highest level of political organization. Even for the kingdoms of Benin and her Urhobo and Asaba neighbours, the component parts were not well knitted together, and it is an autonomous group. The family was the known unit of operation and brought members together closely. Secondly, there was a great deal of interaction largely as result of trade, the people of Benin were in touch with the people of Urhobo, and trade ensured among them. They travelled on foots, by canoes, and displayed their wares especially on their market days but as for the Urhobo which was on urban centre trade took place there at any time. They also engaged in selling from each other clan slaves during the period of the slave trade. Indeed a map of modern Nigeria showing the various roots of trade in this period the people who now make up Nigeria and Delta State are not removed from the other as it sometimes thought and publicly asserted. Finally, the development of the two clan were unequal being that they both dwelt in the forest region, they tended to remain within their smaller units and to engaged in much more limited trading activities, because they mostly use smaller units and to engage in much limited trading activities, because they mostly use foot as a means of transportation but then the Urhobo people being that they were close to main river made use of canoes. This unequal development continued, where by Urhobo developed quickly into a major city through the 20th century, and was to be a major factor in the history of the colonial period of Nigeria’s history.
Geographical factors seem to dispose the territory of Nigeria to movement of peoples from one ecological zone to another in migrations or in interdependent relationships of trade exchange. This exchanges and contacts seem to have occurred even in pre-historic times from the little archaeological evidence yet brought to light of stone tools, pottery, and the spread of Iron technology, the bronzes and also in the spread of food civilization and of food crops. In addition, oral tradition which on the surface purporting to be about the origin of Nigerian peoples uniformly tell of wide spread mixing of various groups and of migrants over long distance from Benin and Asaba. The Niger River which was close to Asaba, provided a water way uniting widely separated groups like the Asaba people and the Benin people through exchange of goods, even if the goods reached their destinations late, while the Benin people exchanged with the Asaba people through the use of land routes. Market systems were developed and various sanctions were used for the control for this trade routes and the regulations of inter-commerce. These sanctions were more informal sanctions of religion and morality unlike sanctions that were often enforced for the political and military authority of a state such as Benin, Oyo, Borno or the Hausa State. The local economic development and contact were reinforced rather that superseded or created by the introduction of European external trade from the Atlantic coast of Nigeria. the trade in slaves brought the Benin and Urhobo people together, therefore in the period of 1900, these people were not isolated from each other and from the outside world.
