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British West Africa or ‘The United States of Africa’? Imperial pressures on the transatlantic anti-slavery movement, 1839–1842

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Abstract

This paper investigates the tensions between the American Colonization Society and Thomas Fowell Buxton’s African Civilisation Society. Despite their common purpose and the ostensibly humanitarian nature of their organisations, the two societies were never able to work together to pursue their common ends of promoting ‘Civilisation, Commerce, and Christianity’ through settlement in West Africa. The paper explores the nature of the public debate between American Colonization Society Secretary Ralph Gurley and African Civilisation Society founder Buxton, arguing that although anti-colonisation opinions in Britain and America did contribute to the division, the under-examined role of commercial and expansionist rivalries between the colonies of Sierra Leone and Liberia may have contributed substantially to a growth of imperial ambition in both organisations, thus limiting their willingness to cooperate in anti-slavery squadron activities along the coast or fundraising efforts in the metropoles.

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Notes

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  73. While the reasons for Liberia’s designation as an ‘unsuccessful’ colony are fraught, the assumption that Liberia was a failure is usually accepted by scholars, who dismiss it both in comparison to Sierra Leone, and in comparison to the postbellum situation of African Americans who remained in the United States. See Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006)

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  1. St Cross and Nuffield Colleges, Oxford University, UK

    Bronwen Everill

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  1. Bronwen Everill
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Correspondence to Bronwen Everill.

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Bronwen Everill was awarded the Donald Cameron Watt Prize by the Transatlantic Studies Association for the best paper by a young scholar at the 2009 Transatlantic Studies Association annual conference.

Bronwen Everill is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Transnational History at St Cross and Nuffield Colleges, Oxford. She recently received her PhD from King’s College London, where she worked with Andrew Porter, having attended Harvard and Oxford for her BA and MSt. Her dissertation - Abolition and Empire: West African Colonization and the Transatlantic Anti-Slavery Movement, 1822–860 — looked at the practical development of ‘Civilization, Commerce and Christianity’ in Sierra Leone and Liberia and these colonies’ influence on the metropolitan anti-slavery debates.

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Everill, B. British West Africa or ‘The United States of Africa’? Imperial pressures on the transatlantic anti-slavery movement, 1839–1842. J Transatl Stud 9, 136–150 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2011.568165

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