"A New Republican Empire on the Shores of Africa": Antislavery Settlements and Sub-Imperial Expansion in West Africa

Throughout the nineteenth century, European and American anti-slave trade policy relied on the use of antislavery settlements for the resettlement of slaves freed by the anti-slave trade squadrons operating off the coast of West Africa.  Freetown, founded in 1787, came to act as the British home for freed slaves when the trade was abolished in 1808.  The American colony of Monrovia followed suit after it was successfully established in 1821.  Finally, the French established their colony, Libreville, in 1848. 

This paper will investigate these three settlements in comparison and connection, focusing on the question of the agency of the settlements’ inhabitants in pushing the frontiers of their colonies.  What was the relationship of antislavery and empire in West Africa?  What was the role of ‘civilization, commerce, and Christianity’ in the settlers’ approach to their surroundings?  How did the settlers’ engagement with indigenous populations determine their attitudes toward expansion?  Did settler attitudes toward antislavery enforcement influence metropolitan decision-making, or did they act independently of one another?  And what did these antislavery colonies contribute to the legacy of antislavery claims in empire building later in the century?

Although ‘humanitarian intervention’ would later emerge as a competitive strategy for empire building, numerous historians have pointed to this early to mid-nineteenth century period as one of minimal colonial expansion.  In fact, what these settlements reveal is the complexity of state-building and colonial expansion associated with sub-imperial agents.   Each of these colonies developed a unique relationship with the metropolitan humanitarian organizations and imperial governments.  Each metropolitan government held different views on the role of antislavery actors as sub-imperial agents and their antislavery settlements as imperial bridgeheads.  The way these relationships and ideologies changed over the course of the nineteenth century had a lasting effect on French, British, and American perceptions of antislavery interventions in Africa.