Abstract
During the fifteen years in which the Sierra Leone Company unhappily carried out its experiments with colonization and legitimate trade, the British Empire was almost constantly at war, and the fortunes of war profoundly changed the British outlook on the world. Britain and the Allies were unable to hold Napoleon at bay in Europe, but the French were gradually deprived of all the most valuable parts of their tropical empire. Saint Domingue, in chronic civil war since 1791, was permanently lost when the Haitians defeated a French expeditionary force in 1802–03. Disorders in the other French West Indian colonies, combined with interruptions of maritime contact, broke the French segment of the South Atlantic System, at least for the time being. For the British West India interest, a French loss was as good as a British victory. The British sugar islands now held a sellers’ monopoly in tropical staples, and there was less reason than ever to break that monopoly by opening new plantations in Africa.
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Footnotes
G. Sharp, A General Plan for Laying out Towns and Townships, of the New-Acquired Lands in the East Indies, America, and Elsewhere …, 2nd ed. (London, 1804), especially pp. 17–24.
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W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 38–40.
Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (London, 1799).
See also A. A. Boahen, “British Penetration of North-West Africa and the Western Sudan, 1788–1861,” (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, London, 1959), pp. 65–68,
J. M. Gray, A History of the Gambia (Cambridge, 1940), p. 283.
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For a general account of Anglo-Ashanti relations see W. E. F. Ward, A History of the Gold Coast (London, 1948), especially pp. 130–54.
The accepted English-language terminology for these people is in a state of confusion. In Nigeria they are called Fulani, as the Hausa called them. In Gambia and Sierra Leone, they are called Fula, a Bambara word. The French call them by the Wolof term, Peuls. Their own name for themselves is Fulbe (sing. Pullo). (D. J. Stenning, Savanna Nomads [London, 1959], P. 2.) For purposes of this book, I shall use the term, Fulbe, for the people as a whole, reserving the more familiar “Fulani” for the Fulbe of Northern Nigeria, who raised a large state in the nineteenth century.
The account of Yoruba history given here and below is based on J. D. Fage, An Introduction to the History of West Africa (Cambridge, 1955);
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and W. L. Mathieson, Great Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839–1865 (London, 1929).
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It would, however, be a mistake to underestimate the official concern with West Africa in the mid-1820’s. In 1806 the Secretary of State had sent out only 209 despatches to all colonies. At that time in West Africa, only Gorée was directly under Crown government, and it received only four of these communications. By 1824, the total number of outgoing dispatches rose to 3,460, of which 324 went to Sierra Leone and the other West African posts. By this measure, at least, West Africa now bulked larger than all colonial business had done in 1806. The volume of West African business in 1824 was also larger than that of the Cape of Good Hope, the only other part of sub-Saharan Africa then within the British sphere. (D. M. Young, The Colonial Office in the Early Nineteenth Century [London, 1961], pp. 248–49.)
Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton, Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the Years 1822, 1823, and 1824, 2 vols. (London, 1826). See also Boahen, “British Penetration of North-West Africa,” pp. 190–98, 249–55.
Hugh Clapperton, Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa, from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo (London, 1829); R. L. Lander, Records of Captain Clapperton’s Last Expedition to Africa … with Subsequent Adventures of the Author, 2 vols. (London, 1830).
René Caillié, Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo, 2 vols. (London, 1830); Boahen, “British Penetration of North-West Africa,” pp. 270–92.
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Curtin, P.D. (1964). West Africa in the New Century: a Pattern of Discovery. In: The Image of Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00539-0_6
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