Thompson, Thomas Perronet (1783–1869)

Abstract

Appointed as the first Crown Governor of the British territory of Sierra Leone in 1808, Thompson was recalled under suspicion of financial impropriety in 1809. The real explanation for his departure, however, had more to do with the fact that the Sierra Leone Company (which had governed since 1790) found excessively disturbing Thompson’s determination to rid the colony of an apprenticeship system whose features, as he saw it, were hardly different from those of slavery. The abuses which Thompson observed had developed, it should be noted, despite the fact that the Sierra Leone Company had been set up by anti-slavery philanthropists, including William Wilberforce and the economist Henry Thornton, with the intention of returning liberated slaves from the Americas to Africa (and, it was hoped, to illustrate the profitability of an African colonial trade not based on slavery).