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Research ArticleArticle

“A Just and Honourable Commerce”

Abolitionist Experimentation in Sierra Leone in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

SUZANNE SCHWARZ
African Economic History, January 2017, 45 (1) 1-45; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/aeh.45.1.1
SUZANNE SCHWARZ
Suzanne Schwarz is Professor of History at the University of Worcester, and an Honorary Research Fellow of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull. She is Principal Investigator for a British Library Endangered Archives Project to preserve the rare and endangered archives in the Sierra Leone Public Archives. She is co-editor with Paul E. Lovejoy of (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2015), and she has published articles in (2012) and (2010) focusing on the experiences of the first “recaptives” released by Royal Navy patrols at Sierra Leone.
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Abstract

This article analyzes the ways in which the Sierra Leone Company, a chartered trading company, attempted to persuade Africans to relinquish the slave trade in favor of an export trade in crops and other natural commodities. Company efforts to reform African economic activity led to increasing levels of travel and investigation on the upper Guinea coast in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The article examines how abolitionists constructed their case for reform in Britain, as well as the strategies deployed to implement their plans on the coast of West Africa. With scant first-hand knowledge of Africa, the directors of the Sierra Leone Company relied on the testimony of European rather than African informants. As a result, Company plans devised in London were misinformed and misdirected. From the early 1790s, Company employees based at Freetown undertook a series of short and long distance journeys to gather intelligence on the potential for cultivation and trade. Although Company ideas for the development of a “just and honourable commerce” were unsuccessful, their policies continued to influence debate on West Africa in the nineteenth century.

  • © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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African Economic History: 45 (1)
African Economic History
Vol. 45, Issue 1
1 Jan 2017
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“A Just and Honourable Commerce”
SUZANNE SCHWARZ
African Economic History Jan 2017, 45 (1) 1-45; DOI: 10.3368/aeh.45.1.1

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“A Just and Honourable Commerce”
SUZANNE SCHWARZ
African Economic History Jan 2017, 45 (1) 1-45; DOI: 10.3368/aeh.45.1.1
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