Our subject, the history of the campaign to end the slave trade in the Bight of Biafra and its hinterland, or southeastern Nigeria, which should be a logical follow-up to the history of the campaign against the same evil in the Atlantic, has been neglected by the many scholars who have made the history of the region their special interest. Perhaps part of the explanation for this situation lies in the poor documentation of the design, methods, and progress of the campaign in the official records, especially for the early part of the period. This poor documentation arose from the fact that by the time the Atlantic phase of the campaign had ended, the focus of British policy in the region, which was never completely altruistic, had shifted more or less totally from philanthropy and humanitarianism to unalloyed commercialism and imperialism. With this shift of focus, the official British attitude to the affairs of the Bight and its hinterland was shaped in part by the assumption and belief, arising from what was seen and heard of social conditions in the Bight, that the slave trade and slavery in the region were not in fact notorious social scandals but at worst some kind of benign social tumors, and that they did not demand emergency surgery.

In consequence, nothing radical or spectacular was done to root out these evils in the course of the last four decades of the nineteenth century. However, in that period, steps were taken to create a protectorate administration or regime and to strengthen and expand legitimate trade in the natural produce of the land, in the belief that any success achieved in these two fields would have spin-off effects. One of these effects was expected to be the death of the slave trade, of slavery, and of other associated barbarous practices. In other words, in the course of the campaign the slave trade had come to be seen as just one other antiquated socioeconomic practice that the people had to be made to discard in order to straighten the highway of legitimate trade and to rechannel local productive energies to achieve what were now perceived as more beneficial ends.