Slave Trade and Abolition

Origins of British Influence

In the 1700s, the British Empire and other European powers had settlements and forts in West Africa but had not yet established the full-scale plantation colonies which existed in the Americas. Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that the African societies were better established and more populous than those of the Americas, thus creating a more formidable barrier to European expansion.

Earlier elements related to this were its founding of the colony at Sierra Leone in 1787 as a refuge for freed slaves, the independent missionary movement intended to bring Christianity to the Edo Empire, and programs of exploration sponsored by learned societies and scientific groups, such as the London-based African Association.

Local leaders, cognizant of the situation in the West Indies, India and elsewhere, recognised the risks of British expansion. A chief of Bonny in 1860 explained that he refused a British treaty due to the tendency to "induce the Chiefs to sign a treaty whose meaning they did not understand, and then seize upon the country",

Slave Trade and Abolition

European slave trading from West Africa began before 1650, with people taken at a rate of about 3,000 per year. This rate rose to 20,000 per year in the last quarter of the century. The slave trade was heaviest in the period 1700–1850, with an average of 76,000 people taken from Africa each year between 1783 and 1792. At first, the trade centred around West Central Africa, now the Congo. But in the 1700s, the Bight of Benin (also known as the Slave Coast) became the next most important hub. Ouidah (now part of Benin) and Lagos were the major ports on the coast. From 1790–1807, predominantly British slave traders purchased 1,000–2,000 slaves each year in Lagos alone.

The trade subsequently continued under the Portuguese. In the Bight of Biafra, the major ports were Old Calabar (Akwa Akpa), Bonny and New Calabar. Starting in 1740, the British were the primary European slave trafficker from this area. In 1767, British traders facilitated a notorious massacre of hundreds of people at Calabar after inviting them onto their ships, ostensibly to settle a local dispute.

Map of Negroland and Guinea including the Slave Coast, 1736, by London cartographer Hermann Moll.

In 1807 the Parliament of the United Kingdom enacted the Slave Trade Act, prohibiting British subjects from participating in the slave trade. Britain subsequently lobbied other European powers to stop the slave trade as well. It made anti-slavery treaties with West African powers, which it enforced militarily. Some of the treaties contained prohibitions on diplomacy conducted without British permission, or other promises to abide by British rule. This scenario provided an opportunity for naval expeditions and reconnaissance throughout the region. Britain also annexed Freetown in Sierra Leone, declaring it a Crown Colony in 1808.

The decrease in trade indirectly led to the collapse of states like the Edo Empire. Britain withdrew from the slave trade when it was the major transporter of slaves to the Americas. The French had abolished slavery following the French Revolution, although it briefly re-established it in its Caribbean colonies under Napoleon. France sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, the same year that it gave up on trying to regain Saint-Domingue. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it ended slavery in its possessions. Between them, the French and the British had purchased a majority of the slaves sold from the ports of Edo. The economy suffered from the decline in the slave trade, although considerable smuggling of slaves to the Americas continued for years afterwards.

Lagos became a major slave port in the late 1700s and into the 1850s. Much of the human trafficking which occurred there was nominally illegal, and records from this time and place are not comprehensive. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Voyage Database, 308,800 were sold across the Atlantic from Lagos in 1776–1850. British and French traders did a large share of this business until 1807, when they were replaced by Portuguese and Spanish. By 1826–1850 the British Royal Navy was intervening significantly with Lagos slave exports.

Whether British conquest of Nigeria resulted from a benevolent motive to end slavery, or more instrumental motives of wealth and power, remains a topic of dispute between African and European historians. Many locals remained unconvinced of the Crown's authority to completely reverse the legal and moral attributes of a social institution through fiat. Regardless, slavery had decimated the population and fuelled militarisation and chaos, thereby paving the way for more aggressive colonisation.