Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760--1900

3. The Original Sin: Anti-slavery, Imperial Expansion, and Early Colonial Rule

In 1851, Britain bombarded Lagos, drove Kosoko into exile at Epe on the northeastern shore of the lagoon, and replaced him as oba with Akitoye, whom the Foreign Office believed would make a more compliant local ally. A decade later, Britain annexed the kingdom, commencing a century of colonial rule that eventually engulfed all of what subsequently became Nigeria. Historians of these events have argued about why they occurred at a time when Britain was in general reluctant to acquire territory in Africa. Existing interpretations oppose motives deriving from a humanitarian desire to end the slave trade, on the one hand, and an economic interest in promoting the growth of the new palm oil trade, on the other, much as early interpretations of abolition juxtaposed morality and economic self-interest in their analyses.1 This chapter argues that Britain’s forcible intervention in the politics of Lagos in 1851 occurred as part of that country’s lengthy campaign to end the slave trade, but that in the bombardment of Lagos, as in the anti-slavery movement more generally, activists and policymakers understood morality and selfinterest not as opposing principles but as interconnected parts of a single great process of reform. At the time of the annexation in 1861, the goal of eliminating the slave trade from the Bight of Benin remained important, largely because of the continuing menace that the Kingdom of Dahomey was believed to present . By then, however, many British officials on the coast and in London had become convinced that commerce in goods other than slaves would not continue to develop at Lagos without the introduction of new state 3 The Original Sin: Anti-slavery, Imperial Expansion, and Early Colonial Rule The Original Sin / 85 structures capable of maintaining political stability locally and of promoting a new cultural and legal order. They saw the new, so-called “legitimate commerce” that Britain sought to develop as essential to the final eradication of the slave trade from West Africa. At the same time, many mid-Victorian policymakers regarded it as part of a further process of reform —the vigorous expansion of commerce abroad—that was vital to the stability and well-being of the British nation and improvement of peoples worldwide.2 A final section of this chapter examines the character of the early colonial state at Lagos. In the process, it illuminates the way a limited number of male slaves of northern origin managed to leave their owners. To uncover the relationship among anti-slavery, commercial expansion, and British intervention at Lagos, it is necessary to look briefly at the history of anti-slavery thought and action. Anti-slavery and Commercial Expansion During the very years that the external slave trade developed at Lagos, a movement emerged in Britain, the United States, and parts of Europe to abolish the abominable traffic in human beings. Abolition transformed British ideas about Africa and interests in it and eventually thrust the British into open conflict with the priorities of Lagos’s rulers. A closely related set of religious and secular beliefs rooted in Protestant evangelical theology and Enlightenment social philosophy shaped the abolitionist worldview and informed British policy toward Lagos in the midnineteenth century. Much simplified, these beliefs held that all men had a right to be free and that they shared a naturally benevolent human nature, which slavery had corrupted. The abolitionists’ ideology also included a conviction that humans could improve themselves by overcoming sin through God’s grace and that whole societies could be reformed by removing obstacles to liberty, benevolence, and happiness through the application of reason. Christians, in their view, had a personal moral duty to relieve the suffering of the innocent and root out obstacles to improvement at home and abroad. A belief in Providence as a transforming force and history as man’s hope of salvation engendered a deep faith in the inevitability of moral and material progress. Influenced by the work of Adam Smith and other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, moreover, many antislavery activists perceived a harmony between morality and utility, understood as the product of the “self-interested decisions” of economic men.3 86 / Slavery and the Birth of an African City To them “morality, self-interest, and human progress were mutually interdependent ” and could be “achieved by the same means.”4 This constellation of ideas led abolitionists to regard slavery as the institution which, more...