Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Maps, Tables and Figures
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The slave trade and commercial agriculture in an African context
- 2 São Tomé and Príncipe: The first plantation economy in the tropics
- 3 The export of rice and millet from Upper Guinea into the sixteenth-century Atlantic trade
- 4 ‘Our indico designe’: Planting and processing indigo for export, Upper Guinea Coast, 1684–1702
- 5 ‘There's nothing grows in the West Indies but will grow here’: Dutch and English projects of plantation agriculture on the Gold Coast, 1650s–1780s
- 6 The origins of ‘legitimate commerce’
- 7 A Danish experiment in commercial agriculture on the Gold Coast, 1788–93
- 8 ‘The colony has made no progress in agriculture’: Contested perceptions of agriculture in the colonies of Sierra Leone and Liberia
- 9 Church Missionary Society projects of agricultural improvement in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone and Yorubaland
- 10 Agricultural enterprise and unfree labour in nineteenth-century Angola
- 11 Commercial agriculture and the ending of slave-trading and slavery in West Africa, 1780s–1920s
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Maps, Tables and Figures
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The slave trade and commercial agriculture in an African context
- 2 São Tomé and Príncipe: The first plantation economy in the tropics
- 3 The export of rice and millet from Upper Guinea into the sixteenth-century Atlantic trade
- 4 ‘Our indico designe’: Planting and processing indigo for export, Upper Guinea Coast, 1684–1702
- 5 ‘There's nothing grows in the West Indies but will grow here’: Dutch and English projects of plantation agriculture on the Gold Coast, 1650s–1780s
- 6 The origins of ‘legitimate commerce’
- 7 A Danish experiment in commercial agriculture on the Gold Coast, 1788–93
- 8 ‘The colony has made no progress in agriculture’: Contested perceptions of agriculture in the colonies of Sierra Leone and Liberia
- 9 Church Missionary Society projects of agricultural improvement in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone and Yorubaland
- 10 Agricultural enterprise and unfree labour in nineteenth-century Angola
- 11 Commercial agriculture and the ending of slave-trading and slavery in West Africa, 1780s–1920s
- Index
Summary
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.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013