Chapter 2 is situated in the context of Portugal’s internal conflicts with its colonies. In 1787, a group of so-called Brahmin priests who attributed racism to their lack of clerical promotions planned a revolt against Portuguese authority in Goa. In the Kingdom of Kongo, a rebellion in 1788 by the smaller Kingdom of Musulu spread into Portuguese slave-trading territories in Angola, initiating a war between Portugal and Musulu. Finally, a conspiracy in 1789 to end Portuguese rule in Minas Gerais, Brazil included slaveholders with outstanding debts who were in jeopardy of losing their property, including the people they enslaved. Two things stand out from placing these events together. First, we see more acutely how slavery and the slave trade not only supported the entirety of the Portuguese empire but also constituted its very framework. Second, and relatedly, the 1798 conspiracy in Bahia may have been more explicitly about race and slavery than these other three episodes. But it is, in fact, race and slavery that tied them together, a claim which orients the reader towards thinking about the Tailors’ conspiracy as part of an empire-wide phenomenon in the remaining chapters.

As noted by Richard Reid, African military history remains ‘perhaps the last bastion of the kind of distorted Eurocentric scholarship that characterised African studies before the 1960s’. This is especially true of the pre-colonial period, on account of both the dearth and the inherent limitations and biases of the sources available for study. The purpose of this contribution is to show that, in both tactical and strategic terms, African pre-colonial warfare was as complex as warfare in any other historical setting. We propose to substantiate our argument by exploring a number of regional case studies organised in a loose chronological order: warfare in the medieval empires of the Sahel, Asante warfare in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, Zulu and Ngoni warfare in southern Africa and east-central African warfare in the age of warlords. The driving questions that the collection proposes to address will be briefly explored in these different contexts, each of which highlights specific strategic dynamics and priorities.

The epilogue takes a broad and expansive view of the nature of the British empire in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tropics. It argues that the British largely abandoned the settlement of the tropics by Europeans by the eighteenth century, becoming more convinced that it was a dangerously unhealthy place. They maintained their hold on the tropics by relying on non-Europeans. The ratios of non-Europeans to Europeans in the tropical empire continued to grow. Ideas about racial differences hardened and became more fully and ardently articulated. They were interwoven with notions of environmental determinism. The British turned more fully to soldiers of African descent in the Caribbean and Sepoy armies in India to help defend the empire. The epilogue explores the large-scale rebellions that erupted against the empire in nineteenth-century India and in the Caribbean, arguing that internal resistance helped to end slavery and, ultimately, the empire. It also underscores the ways in which English colonization and trade across the tropical zone was linked and how the wealth accrued through tropical exploitation and slavery helped facilitate the rise of the British empire.

The East India Dock Company followed and by 1810, there were also three on the south bank. Investment came predominantly from the capital’s wealthy mercantile and shipping communities, with slave trade interests strongly represented in both the West India and London companies. Wartime conditions failed to affect investment or impede the capital’s remarkable dock boom. The design for the downriver West and East India systems presented few problems, unlike the constricted setting of the London Docks. Labour shortages, bad weather and material scarcity affected construction by generally experienced contractors, but all docks were operating by 1806. The final costs exceeded estimates but only in the case of the London Docks by a large margin. Clearing housing and industries in Wapping burdened it with long-term debt. All the north bank companies chose a hierarchical employment structure. In contrast to strict supervision in the West India Docks, London replicated the traditional system on the quays, allowing its managers considerable autonomy. In their new regulated workplace, labourers faced restrictions, discipline and the loss of traditional perks.

Focusing on the relation and conflict between imperial, colonial, and local levels, Chapter 1 lays out the historical context that gave rise to the collective freedom suit. It first traces the process of making law and policy according to the imperial state’s reform imperatives here directed at the privatization and revival of an extractive metal industry based on the once rich copper mines of El Cobre near Santiago de Cuba. Crucial to the production of artillery in the Crown’s arms industry, copper was at the time a strategic resource for the imperial state. But for the beneficiaries of the privatized mining estate, the most valuable resource were the former royal slaves who had long lived in quasi freedom as an unconventional pueblo in the mining jurisdiction. A growing demand for slaves in the colony led to the re-enslavement, removal, and sale of hundreds of cobreros, or natives of El Cobre, thereby upending former local customary practices. A denied offer for a collective self-purchase, or coartación, and land eventually led to a wrongful enslavement action in Madrid. The chapter shows the major impact of imperial Bourbon reforms and of global factors in this so-called hinterland region of empire.

In the sixteenth-century Lutheran university, anthropological studies related the human as a microcosm analogically to the world as a macrocosm. The great chain of being dictated hierarchies corresponding to parts of the human body, forms of knowledge, and cosmic structure. Major claimed to found a new anthropology that spurned analogy and related the human to nature through experiment. He set experimental anthropology as the basis for the entire encyclopedia of arts and sciences because human cognitive processes shaped all knowledge. Major first exhibited his anthropology in a public human dissection in 1666. He deployed it against both academic and Rosicrucian views of the microcosm such as those maintained by his nemesis Johann Ludwig Hannemann. He also countered profit-driven arguments about humans. Having already argued in 1665 that the anatomist could correct Biblical interpreters’ views of black skin, he orchestrated in 1675 a public human anatomy of a Black woman, which was the first anatomical study of skin pigmentation. His colleague, Johann Nicolaus Pechlin, performed the dissection, arguing against Hannemann that skin color offered no justification for the slave trade.

A “spirit of association” took hold of Brazilian businessmen and lawmakers in the Regency period of the 1830s. This spirit manifested itself in the Rio Doce Company drive, which directly inspired Brazilians to launch the first homegrown colonization companies in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro. This chapter traces the trajectory of these pioneering domestic enterprises and examines their operations and their meanings in the context of continuous logistical and political challenges both at home and abroad. Ultimately, these companies set a precedent in institutionalizing reception and conveyance mechanisms, lobbying successfully for pro-colonization policies, and collaborating with the Brazilian diplomatic corps to build a powerful international network of migrant recruitment overseas. Despite these companies’ broad appeal among quarreling elites, both faltered amid the financial crisis of 1837,. The colono trade they spurred in periodic overlap with the illegal slave trade, however, opened the door for continued undocumented migrations from the Azores.

From the fifteenth to the twentieth century, the use of convicted labor to supplement overseas garrisons was commonplace across colonial frontiers. While this practice has been the subject of recent study in the French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish Empires, the British military deployment of convicts has been comparatively neglected. This matters for two reasons. A focus on civil transportation systems appears to have led to a considerable underestimation of overall transportation numbers. Second, while much has been written about the manner in which Britain redirected transportation from the Atlantic to its new Australian colonial possessions in the late eighteenth century, the military deployment of convict labor remained centered on the Atlantic. In fact, during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, many more convicts served in the African and Caribbean colonial garrisons than were ever shipped to the Antipodes. In this chapter, we use a range of different sources to piece together the military deployment of convicted labor in the British Atlantic World in the period 1780–1820, and to explore its complex relationships with the transatlantic slave trade.

The Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 delineated territorial settlements, coronated several newly independent monarchs and resulted in an official declaration on the abolition of the slave trade, but it did not treat the issue of piracy. This paradox is the key concern of this chapter. Vienna’s Final Acts were the end product of these talks, and though they did not mention ‘Barbary piracy’, their conclusion would nevertheless have a great impact on the international treatment of this newly perceived threat to security. The years 1814–1815 were an important turning point because they initiated a period of transition. The congress created an international context in which North African corsairing could be reconceived as a threat to security. This new perception of threat hinged upon misconceptions of the supposed fanaticism and irrationality that allegedly characterised North African privateering. It also disregarded the long history of diplomatic and commercial contact between both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.

Long lived in England, a place which was changing, for more than forty years until his death in 1813. He actively campaigned against black and white abolitionists and for the continuation of the slave trade. Despite making many additions and corrections, he never completed a second edition of the History. He had endeavoured to clinch his argument as to the essential inequality of white and black with a demolition of the free black Jamaican, Francis Williams. Educated in England, Williams was a poet and mathematician, and had established a school for black boys in Spanish Town. He had been cited by Hume in 1753 as providing an example of how ‘Negroes’ could never do more than mimic white Europeans. Williams represented for Long the terrifying spectre of African claims for equality: he claimed legal rights, could write Latin poetry, possessed a library of Enlightenment scholarship, taught his pupils Newtonian principles and dressed like a gentleman. It was essential to undermine him, pouring scorn on all his pretensions. But in so doing, Long demonstrated how his own privileged whiteness rested on sand. Only by denigrating blackness could he maintain his own sense of an entitled self; he needed that ‘otherness’ to know himself.

Making money from plantations meant engaging in the circuit of West India trade regulated through a mercantilist system that protected the interests of the ‘mother country’. Long needed to demonstrate to his metropolitan readership that Jamaica brought great wealth to Britain and that the production of sugar depended on slavery. The circuit of the West India trade connected England, West Africa and the Caribbean through a complex set of relations, at the heart of which sat the merchant house. Long’s Uncle Beeston headed the West India house of Drake and Long in the City of London and Long was well aware of the centrality of merchants and the use of bills of exchange to facilitate the sugar and slavery business. Given the increasing criticism of the conditions of the slave trade by the early 1770s, he attempted to sanitize it. The merchants used legers, accounting and numeracy to distance themselves from the realities of slavery. They controlled the system of credit and debt on which this mercantile capitalist formation depended.

Disaster struck the Niger and the Congo expeditions alike, though it took somewhat different forms in each case. The Congo River’s cataracts and the region’s diseases posed the most serious obstacles to the latter expedition, though it also ran out of the trade goods needed to hire guides and porters. For the Niger expedition, the rapid reduction in the number of pack animals at its disposal created serious logistical problems, which were amplified by the power the ruler of Futa Jallon increasingly wielded over its operations. Although disease also contributed to the expedition’s difficulties, the most prominent factor in its failure was political; African authorities blocked its passage because they saw it as a threat to their religious, strategic, and economic interests. By contrast, the Congo expedition reassured Boma’s rulers about its intentions, easing its access to the river. Both expeditions’ experiences demonstrated that African polities and peoples shaped their outcomes in important ways.

This introductory chapter highlights the book’s key themes. It explains why Mungo Park exerted so much influence on the British cultural imagination and inspired so many others to follow in his footsteps. It shows how Park’s legacy led to the two expeditions that are central focus of the book, one to follow up on his failed mission to trace the course of the Niger River, the other to determine whether the Niger became the Congo River, as he believed. It sets the two expeditions in the broader context of Britain’s imperial rivalry with France, the slave trade and the campaign to end it, and the independent agendas of the region’s African states. It then asks why these expeditions disappeared from the annals of British exploration, a question that requires an examination of the roles that mythic masculinity and heroic failure have played in shaping popular interest in explorers and exploration. Challenging these ideas, it calls for a more integrative history of exploration that acknowledges the involvement of a wide range of parties and frames their actions within the context of the political, social, and economic forces that transformed British interest in Africa in the early nineteenth century.

The British decision to dispatch expeditions to trace the courses of the Niger and Congo rivers was driven by two major considerations—strategic worries that the French would displace the British as the dominant European power in the region after the war and abolitionist concerns that the only way to stop the slave trade was to pressure Africans in the interior to turn to ‘legitimate commerce’. Acting on Park’s suspicion that the Niger and the Congo were the same river, officials organized expeditions to explore both of them. The Niger expedition was an army operation, its caravan consisting mainly of soldiers. The Congo expedition was a more scientifically-oriented naval endeavor that initially intended to use a steamship to go upriver. Both expeditions were large, costly ventures, indicating that various British ideological, political, and commercial groups had an interest in their success.