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84 t h r e e Empire without America British Plans for Africa in the Era of the American Revolution C h r is t o ph e r L e sli e B r o w n B r i t i s h e n t e r p r i s e in Africa still fares poorly in the new scholarship on the expanding empire of the late eighteenth century.The spirit of integration that is meant to guide the new Atlantic history has yet to inspire sustained engagement with British ambitions and activities on the eastern side of the Atlantic. We have an increasing number of works that try to link the histories of Britain, Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean. But the British experience in Africa rarely claims attention outside the traditional focus on the contours of the Atlantic slave trade. That scholarship swells and deepens at an impressive rate but progresses, typically, on a separate track from the renaissance in British Atlantic and British imperial history, and concentrates usually on questions restricted to its particular concerns. The cliometric staples that preoccupy slave trade scholars—directions and flows, volumes and prices, sex ratios and mortality rates—leave few opportunities for comparative work with other areas of British enterprise, outside the study of migration. To appreciate the range of British ambitions in the eighteenth century, we have to go back more than forty years, to Philip Curtin’s Image of Africa or Vincent Harlow’s Founding of the Second British Empire. On the character of British outposts on the coast at midcentury, the most comprehensive studies remain essays in the Cambridge History of the British Empire, now at least sixty years old, or the even more venerable research by Eveline C. Martin on the Company of Merchants 85 Empire without America: British Plans for Africa Trading to Africa.1 More recent overviews, the new Oxford History of the British Empire most notably, neglect these topics entirely.2 There are exceptions, of course. David Hancock, for example, puts a Bance Island slaving fort at the center of a far broader story about merchants and trade in the eighteenth century.3 Emma Christopher has described the experience of slave ship sailors during the months that they spent on the West African coast. And there is the work of Randy Sparks on the Robin Johns of Efik, in the Bight of Biafra, slave traders betrayed into slavery in Dominica who managed an escape to Bristol before returning to their home and to the slaving businesses they temporarily had lost. Certain Africanists have begun to place their subject in an Atlantic context—Michael Gomez, Robert Harms, Robin Law, Paul Lovejoy, Kristin Mann, and Joseph Miller in particular.4 Nonetheless, most scholars of the eighteenth-century British Empire still tend to treat the British in Africa as a wholly separate subject. To a point, this is how it should be. British enterprise in Africa was different from British enterprise in the Americas or, for that matter, British enterprise in India. There was little migration, very small settlements, few missionaries, limited power, minimal property, no colonial government . One business predominated—the trade in human bodies—which was sufficiently unique in organization and in its moral implications to demand a distinct historical scholarship. The story of the British in Africa is, first and foremost, the story of the Atlantic slave trade. Yet, the obvious and important differences between British trade in Africa and British enterprise elsewhere must not blind us to promising opportunities for comparison. At present, for example, we know almost nothing about the small garrisons sent to man the slave forts on what the British knew as the Gold Coast and Slave Coast during the eighteenth century. And too little attention has been given to early British ambitions to capture West African territory. Most scholars know of the challenges the British government faced in governing the territories captured from France, Spain, and the rulers of the Mughal Empire following the Seven Years’ War. But even specialists sometimes forget that in 1765 Britain also established a colony in West Africa, more than two decades before the better-known settlement for black loyalists at Sierra Leone. Parliament assigned to this new province of Senegambia a governor, council, courts, and constitution in the same years that it also authorized rather different governments for the Floridas, Quebec, and the Ceded Islands in the West Indies. British appointees conspired 86 Christopher Leslie Brown to transform Senegambia...

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