Efforts to stem the slave trade in the nineteenth century resulted in the interception of slave ships in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the forced relocation of the Africans to a diverse range of settings, including the Cape Colony, Sierra Leone, Cuba, Brazil, Angola, the Gambia, and St. Helena, as well as various islands in the British Caribbean. Sierra Leone dealt with the largest number of arrivals, with approximately one hundred thousand Africans disembarked at Freetown between 1808 and 1863. The scale of operations was significantly different at two early sites of British slave trade suppression, as the number of “captured negroes” released at Freetown in 1812 exceeded the total of some 2,100 “prize negroes” diverted to the Cape between 1808 and 1816. The locations at which former slaves were disembarked had far-reaching implications for their subsequent experiences, as the capacity of an area to absorb and support these new arrivals was dependent on the geographical extent of territory, the quality of land available, the nature of the economy, and the number and origins of people already resident there. The experiences of Africans released were also influenced by whether they were relocated to a slave society or an area where slavery was of marginal importance in the social structure.

The Sierra Leone Peninsula was distinctive from the sites of later international courts at Rio de Janeiro and Havana, as attempts had been made by the abolitionist-inspired Sierra Leone Company from 1791 to define Freetown as an area free from slave trading and slave ownership. As an early experimental site for engineering a shift from slavery to free labor, the British Crown Colony of Sierra Leone established precedents for “disposal” after the arrival of “captured negroes,” which was the initial term used to refer to liberated Africans in Sierra Leone. These early resettlement practices were then imitated in various locations across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds in the early nineteenth century. A common feature of disposal systems was that they were typically based on an assumption that former slaves were not ready to enjoy “full freedom” and that any changes in status and labor arrangements should be gradual. This approach was also characteristic of the system of apprenticeship implemented following the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in the 1830s.

The diverse roles played by entrepreneurial women in trade and agriculture in pre-colonial Africa have been the subject of a number of studies in the last four decades. This scholarship has focused particularly on elite merchant women – donas (wealthy African and Eurafrican women), signares and nharas (both words, ‘from the Portuguese senhora … signified women of wealth and influence’) – although the experiences of poor and enslaved women have recently been traced through parish records in Angola. The planting of a new port town at Freetown on the Sierra Leone peninsula in the closing decade of the eighteenth century opened up opportunities for neighbouring Temne women, as well as newly arrived migrant women of African origin and descent, to generate income through food cultivation, trade, commerce and service provision.

This chapter explores how uprooted and displaced women, who had already experienced multiple forms of migration, drew on skills from their earlier lives to exploit economic opportunities in West Africa. The settlers’ migrant origins placed constraints on their capacity to conduct long-distance trade and to profit from the accumulation of slave labour. Freetown was not an indigenous African settlement, and its distinctive abolitionist agenda meant that the experiences of women in this new town were markedly different to those of coastal merchant women in other settings. In contrast to trading women in Benguela, Luanda and Saint Louis, women in Freetown were prohibited, in theory if not always in practice, from slave trading or owning enslaved Africans. The arrival of ‘recaptive’ Africans after 1808 altered the situation, and settler women were able to capitalise on a new supply of labour to support their economic enterprises (see Map 2). As these female settlers were also outsiders and ‘strangers’ with no contacts to inland societies, their opportunities for wealth accumulation were more limited than those of entrepreneurial women in other coastal settings.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the convergence of various streams of Atlantic migration on Sierra Leone resulted in an intermixing of women from diverse cultures with different life experiences of freedom and enslavement in America, Africa, the West Indies and Europe. As the chapters by Hilary Jones and Kristin Mann in this volume demonstrate, inward migration shaped the cosmopolitan character of other coastal towns in West Africa.

ON 6 April 1792 James Irving junior, a Scottish slave ship surgeon, met James Currie, an abolitionist and Edinburgh-trained doctor, at Liverpool Infirmary. The occasion for their meeting was a formal examination by Currie and two other practitioners to establish whether Irving had sufficient medical knowledge to qualify for certification under the terms of the Dolben Act of 1788. Irving and Currie were both from Dumfriesshire, and their places of birth in Langholm and Kirkpatrick Fleming were located only fourteen miles apart. In other respects they had little in common. Currie studied medicine in Edinburgh and graduated MD from Glasgow University, whereas Irving was a barber-surgeon whose more limited medical knowledge was built up through his apprenticeship to his older cousin and namesake as a surgeon's mate on slave ships. Their views on the trade in enslaved Africans were diametrically opposed; Currie had already written various condemnations of the trade, whereas Irving had displayed some eagerness in calculating the bonus he would receive depending on how many Africans died in the course of the Middle Passage on the Ellen in 1791.

Other Scottish surgeons, who either felt no moral qualms about the dehumanisation of Africans as cargo or who had become inured to the brutality of the trade, undertook a series of slaving voyages from Liverpool. James Irving senior (later Captain Irving) from Langholm in Dumfriesshire undertook his first slaving voyage on the Vulture in 1783 and five years later persuaded his younger cousin (James Irving junior) to join him as surgeon's mate on his fifth voyage as a surgeon. The Edinburgh-trained surgeon Archibald Dalzel became involved in slave trading following his discharge from the Royal Navy at the end of the Seven Years War. He accepted a position as surgeon at Anomabu fort in the employ of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa in 1763, and was subsequently appointed as governor of the fort at Whydah in 1767. Born in Kirkliston, West Lothian, Dalzel also captained a number of slave-trading voyages during his career, including one from Liverpool.

The idea of the promotion of commercial agriculture in West Africa as a substitute for the export of slaves is familiar in the context of the Abolitionist movement, from the late eighteenth century onwards. But the alternative of employing slaves in cultivation in Africa, rather than transporting them to the Americas, existed from the beginning of maritime contacts between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. Most if not all of the crops enslaved Africans were employed to cultivate in the Americas could also be grown in West Africa. Of the crops grown on American plantations, some were not introduced into West Africa until relatively late — notably coffee. But others were either already established in West Africa when European traders first arrived in the fifteenth century, or were introduced there soon afterwards.

Consider, first, rice, which became a major export from South Carolina — a variety of rice (oryza glaberrima) was indigenous to West Africa, and indeed was purchased by European traders for provisions for the Middle Passage. Admittedly it was Asian rice (oryza sativa) which was cultivated for export in Carolina; although ‘Guinea rice’ was also introduced there, it was grown by slaves only for their own subsistence. It might be supposed that African rice, although acceptable for slaves' provisions, was not saleable in Europe. However, Asian rice seems to have been introduced, presumably by Europeans, into West Africa by the 1570s, when a white form of rice was reported being cultivated in Sierra Leone.

This volume presents a selection of papers from a conference held at the German Historical Institute London (GHIL), in September 2010, on the topic of ‘Commercial Agriculture in Africa as an Alternative to the Slave Trade’. This Introduction begins by situating this topic in its context within the history and historiography of western Africa.

The idea of ‘legitimate commerce’

The idea of promoting the export of agricultural produce from Africa first became central to European thought in the context of the campaign to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the late eighteenth century onwards, with actual projects on the ground in West Africa beginning with Danish attempts to establish plantations on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) from 1788, followed by the British colony of Sierra Leone, after it was taken over by the Sierra Leone Company in 1791. After the legal abolition of the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, proposed commercial alternatives to it became known in contradistinction as ‘legitimate’ (or ‘legal’ or ‘lawful’) commerce (or trade). Strictly, the term ‘legitimate commerce’ designated trade in anything other than slaves, including non-agricultural commodities such as gold and ivory, but in practice interest was mainly concentrated on the promotion of commercial agriculture.

Historical interpretations of Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade have, until recently, placed a disproportionate emphasis on abolitionist campaigning activity and achievements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This trend can be traced back to Thomas Clarkson's influential History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament published in 1808, the year after the passage of the bill to abolish the slave trade. The attention given to the work of humanitarian campaigners has tended to obscure Britain's position as the most prolific and efficient slavetrading nation in the eighteenth century.

James Irving was among the many thousands of British men who contributed to the enforced migration of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. This young Scottish surgeon undertook his first slaving venture from the port of Liverpool in 1783. During his career in Liverpool he was employed by John Dawson, Britain's leading slave merchant and ‘possibly the world's leading slave trader’. As a surgeon on Guinea ships, Irving faced a very high risk of mortality but this position was also ‘the second most profitable on a slave vessel’. Respected by his superior officers, Irving made rapid progress in the trade and was offered his first captaincy of a slave ship in 1789.

Irving also persuaded his younger cousin and namesake to leave Scotland to take up a career as a surgeon in the Liverpool slave trade. Such family links were not unusual. Other captains and officers had relatives who were engaged in the Liverpool slave trade. As Behrendt points out, a ‘few sons followed their fathers as captains in the slave trade’. Richard and John Kendall, both slaveship captains in Liverpool in the late eighteenth century, were the sons of John Kendall who captained several Liverpool vessels in the 1760s and 1770s. A number of brothers served as slave-ship captains, including Hugh and William Crow and James and Thomas Stowell.

James Irving's career sheds light on the brutal reification of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, an accepted feature of British commerce for most of the eighteenth century. Abolitionist voices were raised in protest at various intervals in the eighteenth century.