European relationships with West Africa in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century were to a large extent dominated by the European effort to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade and to replace it by trade in the agricultural produce of West Africa. This led in part to the foundation of Sierra Leone and Liberia, the strengthening of British and French trading depots in other parts of the coast, a new European curiosity about the interior of Africa, and a renewed interest in effecting social and cultural change in Africa through Christian missions. This range of activities became an integrated programme of the abolitionists – stopping the slave trade, maintaining an anti-slavery naval squadron to enforce the prohibition, expanding ‘legitimate trade’, supporting missionary activities and exploration of the interior. These activities encouraged the involvement of Europeans in Africa, and several European and American nations came to participate in them to a greater or lesser extent. Abolition of the slave trade became the most common ideology to justify to the European public the expense and the fact of this involvement. This ideology was particularly strong in Britain, and from Britain it affected other countries. For example, owing to the tradition of Anglo-French rivalry in West Africa, the British example ensured the wholesale adoption of the abolitionist programme in France. Consequently, in the written European sources on Africa in this period, whether from missionaries, explorers, ‘legitimate’ traders, naval officers or government officials, the theme of abolition looms large, often disproportionately large, and the period 1807 to about 1870 in West African history has often been called the anti-slave trade or abolitionist era.