¹ The journals refered to are the Journal of African History, The International journal of African Historical studies, and the Canadian jourmal of African studies.

² curtin, Philip D., The Image of Africa: Britidh Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison, 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar In the third part of this book—the section treating ther years 1830—52—the opening chapter is entitled ‘The Era of the Niger Expedition’, That chapter and another, ‘West Africa in the south Atlantic Economy’ provide the main statement of his views concerning the place of Africa in Britain's overall Aflantic policy. My remarks will be addressed to these chapters.

³ Gallagher, J. ‘Fowell Boxton and the New African policy, 1838–1842’, Cambridge Historical journal, X (1950), 36–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gallagher firmly asserts that the Whig's favourable response to Buxton's plan was dictated by their need to attract radical and humanitarian support.

⁴ Roberts, G. W., ‘Immigration of Africans into the British Caribbean’ Population studies, VII (1954), 260.Google Scholar

⁵ see, for example,Kopytoff, Jean Herskovits, A Preface to Modern Nigeria: The ‘Sierra Leonians’ in Yoruba, 1830–1890 (Madison, 1965)Google Scholar and Ajayi, J. F. AChristian Missions in Nigeria 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite (Evanston, 1965).Google Scholar Ajayi acknowledges that in Mar. 1841 when the Niger expedition was preparing to leave England, Lord John Russell, Colonial secretary, was emphatically encouraging the emigration the liberated Africans to the West Indies, not Nigeria (p. 28).

⁶ Published by Oxford University Press, 1963.

⁷ Peterson, John, Province of Freedom, A History of Sierra Leone, 1787–1870 (Evanston, 1969). In his A History of Sierra Leone (London, 1962) Christopher Fyfe gives some attention to recaptive emigration to the Caribbean (pp. 219, 224–5).Google Scholar

⁸ Asiegbu, J. U. J, Slavery and the Politics of Liberation 1787–1861: A Study of Liberated African Emigration and British Anti-Slavery Policy (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

⁹ This figure is taken from Curtin's Image of Africa, 294; he relied on Kuczynski's Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire (London, 1948), 1, 117, 318.

¹⁰ The African Institution, a philanthropic society of Claphamite origins established in 1807, was active in Sierra Leone for several years, but it gradually withered undersuccessive difficulties. In 1827 it held its last public meeting: Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 123. Long before its dissolution, the African Institution had shifted its attention to the West Indies where it sought the amelioration of slavery.

¹¹ Gambia involved merely a few riverain islands and a narrow strip of shoreline (the ceded mile) which native governments were fighting to retain. See Gray, J. M., A History of the Gambia (New York, 1966), 351.Google Scholar

¹² Lloyd, Christopher, The Navy and the Slave Trade (London, 1949), 280–1.Google Scholar Between 1821 and 1830 the size of the squadron assigned to the west coast of Africa varied from five to eight vessels. In seven of those years, the squadron numbered six ships, mainly small craft in the category of sloops and brigs.

¹³ Peterson, Province of Freedom. My remarks convey the thrust of Peterson's chapter five, ‘Foundations of Liberated African Independence’. His conclusions reinforce those of Fyfe. While Peterson hastens to acknowledge (p. 162) that Sierra Leone was a failure in terms of British expectations, it was, he argues, highly successful in terms of the aspirations of the recaptives.

¹⁴ Control was no small problem. Administration, like proselytization, suffered from the extraordinary rate of death and disease among Europeans. Of the 79 missionaries and wives sent to Sierra Leone by the C.M.S. in a period of 20 years, 53 perished: Peterson, Province of Freedom, 140. English replacements could scarcely be found. Administrative positions lay vacant for months—sometimes years—and even when offices were regularly occupied, the rapid turnover of occupants precluded consistency in public affairs.

¹⁵ Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 155–167.

¹⁶ Report of Commissioners of Inquiry, 29 June 1827, in Newbury, C. W., British Policy Toward West Africa: Select Documents, 1786–1874 (Oxford, 1965), 187–8.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 178.

¹⁸ Peterson, Province of Freedom, 150.

¹⁹ Murray, D. J., The West Indies and the Development of Colonial Government (Oxford, 1965). This paragraph offers in capsule form one of Murray's main themes.Google Scholar

²⁰ British Guiana, Trinidad, and St Lucia—prizes of the war with Napoleonic France— were ruled under a new and authoritarian system by which all legislative initiative derived from the Crown. Trinidad became the main testing ground for legislation modifying the conditions of slavery. The need to evoke similar ameliorative measures from the legislative colonies and, when that was done, to supervise their operation vastly increased the responsibilities of the colonial bureaucracy.

²¹ Public Record Office, Colonial Office 137/167 no. 27, Keane to Murray, 21 Nov. 1828.

²² Checkland, S. G., The Gladstones: A Family Biography, 1764–1851 (Cambridge, 1971), 263.Google Scholar

²³ This figure is computed, very roughly, from colonial correspondence, census data, and from the statistics offered by the most reliable contemporary authors, including Montgomery Martin, Henry Dalton, and Sir Robert Schomburgk.

²⁴ The question of the superiority of free labour over slave labour was the main preoccupation of the General Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in June 1840. Earlier abolitionist literature is laden with this viewpoint. See, for example, Thomas Clarkson, Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of Slaves in the British Colonies with a View to their Ultimate Extinction (New York, 1823).

²⁵ Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention (London, 1841), 396–8.Google Scholar

²⁶ Captain Charles Stuart, an abolitionist, lectured the freedmen of Guiana in 1839: ‘You strengthen the fetters of the slave in other lands, by giving colour to the charge, that if not compelled by force to labour as he is, he would be as idle as you are’: P.R.O., CO. 111/165, Address by Captain Stuart. Speaking before a gathering of Jamaica freedmen, Joseph John Gurney, a well known Quaker abolitionist, declared that the eyes of slave owners throughout the Americas were fixed on the British Caribbean: it was incumbent upon the freedmen, he said, to prove that free labour was more profitable than slave labour. See Gurney's, A Winter in the West Indies (London, 1840), 113, 240–4.Google Scholar The permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, James Stephen, wrote that a decrease in the profits of free labour would reinforce the slave system in other countries. P.R.O., C.O. 295/535, Correspondnce of Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, Stephen to Stanley, 3 Nov. 1841.

²⁷ The planters hoped to employ strict vagrancy and contract laws as a means of controlling the freedmen and evoking continuous labour on the plantations.

²⁸ Curtin, Philip D., The Atlantic Slave Trade. A Census (Madison, 1969), 234.Google Scholar

²⁹ After emancipation, the West Indies could not supply the demand for sugar in the home market. Consequently, the protective duties on sugar operated as a subsidy to Caribbean planters. The danger of this was that British consumers would demand the elimination of protection—which they did successfully in 1846—leaving the West Indian planters to face the withering competition of slave labour producers.

³⁰ Temperley, Howard, British Antislavery 1833–1870 (Columbia, South Carolina, 1972), 24.Google Scholar

³¹ Temperley, British Antislavery, 49.

³² It is interesting to note that American abolitionists perceived the inflated character of Buxton's expectations. In the Preface to the first American printing of The African Slave Trade (Philadelphia, 1839), the Executive Committee of the Eastern Pennsylvania AntiSlavery Society warned their readers that Buxton's plan would prove more ‘ingenious’ than ‘effectual’—that it was, at best, a doubtful expedient.

³³ Gallagher, J., ‘Fowell Buxton and the New African Policy’, 44.Google Scholar

³⁴ Minute by Stephen, James, 8 Dec. 1840, in C. W. Newbury, Select Documents, 154.Google Scholar

³⁵ About 90 per cent of the money spent in the crusade to end West Indian apprenticeship came from Quaker pacifists. The Central Emancipation Committee that administered these funds was the most richly endowed of any anti-slavery body in the nineteenth century. Its focus was exclusively British Caribbean. Temperley, British Antislavery, 39–40.

³⁶ Gallagher, J., ‘Fowell Buxton and the New African Policy’, 48–9.Google Scholar

³⁷ Curtin, Image of Africa, chapters 12 and 18. It might be argued that Curtin's work is primarily intellectual history—the history of British ideas regarding Africa in the early nineteenth century. In that regard it is superlative. But, as is often the case with intellectual history, engaging ideas are credited with an importance which, as determinants of historical events, they do not deserve, with the result that the powerful interests which actually generated human actions are either inadequately treated or ignored.

³⁸ Curtin, Image of Africa, 440–1.

³⁹ Laird proposed that such emigration, undertaken at government expense, would strengthen the free labour force in the British Caribbean, undermine slave labour competition, and introduce European civilization to Africa. Referring to the Select Committee on the West Coast of Africa, 1842, Curtin writes: ‘The Committee's report followed Laird's recommendation and called for African labor to redress the competitive balance in tropical America’, Image of Africa, 442.

⁴⁰ Palmerston's pressure upon the Portuguese government had intensified long before Buxton's plan was introduced to the public. See, Bethell, Leslie, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1970), 1155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar It is interesting to note that the British ambassador in Lisbon during the period of intense pressure on the Portuguese government was Lord Howard de Walden, a prominent Jamaica proprietor.

⁴¹ Curtin, Image of Africa, 304.

⁴² P.R.O., C.O. 295/106 no. 8. Hill to Aberdeen, 3 Mar. 1835; P.R.O., C.O. 111/146 no. 197. Smyth to Glenelg, 8 Aug. 1836.

⁴³ Deerr, Noel, The History of Sugar (London, 1950), II, 193–203, 377.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Parliamentary Papers, 1852–3 xcix (461).

⁴⁵ Temperley, British Antislavery, 116–17.

⁴⁶ Knorr, Klaus, British Colonial Theories 1570–1850 (Toronto, 1944), 317–19.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ P.R.O., C.O. 318/148, Memorandum, Stephen to Vernon Smith, 3 Nov. 1840.

⁴⁸ Merivale, Herman, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies (London, 1861), 332.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ P.R.O., C.O. 295/133 no. 45. Statement of Johnson, T. F., Agent General of Immigrants (Trinidad), enclosed in MacLeod to Russell, 29 May 1841.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ P.R.O., C.O. 318/151, Treasury Papers, Trevelyan to Stephen, 25 Jan. 1841.

⁵¹ This view was forcefully expressed by West Indian governors. Governor Henry Light of British Guiana believed that Africans would benefit from residence in the West Indies and that ‘civilization may flow back from hence to Africa’, Trans-Atlantic migrations would, he argued, ‘aid in the great aim of our country—the civilization of Africa…’. Parl. Papers, 1843, XXXVIII (438), Light to Stanley, 3 Oct. 1842.

⁵² Asiegbu, Slavery and the Politics of Liberation, 190.

⁵³ During the same period, about 100,000 East Indians migrated to the British West Indies.

⁵⁴ Asiegbu, J. U. J., Slavery and the Politics of Liberation 1787–1861, A Study of Liberated African Emigration and British Anti-Slavery Policy (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Parl. Papers, 1840, XXXIV (151), Light to Normanby, 26 June 1839;Google ScholarDalton, Henry, The History of British Guiana (London, 1855), I, 450–1.Google Scholar