"Capable of Improvement": Commerce, Christianity, and the Idea of an Independent Africa, 1740-1810

Christa Dierksheide

To understand the end of the transatlantic slave trade, most scholars begin with 1807.  They look to the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain or to the economic conditions of the West Indies at the close of the eighteenth century.  Only a handful of historians ever consider why abolition might have seemed plausible in the first place.  Yet as my paper argues, a counterpoint—the idea of an independent Africa—had to exist in the Anglo-American imagination before widespread anti-slave trade sentiment could ever be mustered.  It is my aim to demonstrate that abolition was not the real endpoint or goal for many in the Anglophone Atlantic.  Rather, the primary concern was the complete reversal of the world the slave trade had made: global, rather than Atlantic commerce, and free exchange, rather than the monopolistic and exploitative plunder of African shores.  In this reverse image of the Anglophone world, a balance of wealth and power would be assured through civilized commerce on an unprecedented scale.  Of course, contemporaries understood that Africa would somehow have to be integrated into their world.  The foundation for that inclusion, many believed, was Christianity.  If Africans became Christians, like Britons and Americans, then there would exist foundational ties of amity and equality that transcended national boundaries and difference.  And if Africans also became a people, then they would form a legitimate and independent nation of their own, separate from Britain and America.  But when a scheme for an independent nation in Africa was tried at the behest of the abolitionist Granville Sharp in 1787, the “experiment” proved a complete and utter failure.  Indeed, the failure of Sierra Leone seemed to prove that Africans were incapable of forming their own people or of uniting under universal precepts of Christianity.  This in turn constituted the basis for nineteenth-century racial and imperial attitudes in America and the British Empire.  In America, slave owners believed that enslavement saved blacks from their own incapacities; Christian religion rendered them happy and productive bondsmen.  Throughout the British Empire, abolitionists-turned-global-reformers imposed the paternalistic hand of British government and religion upon vast swathes of non-white subject peoples.

[WP #0622]