2 - The Coastal Phase, ca. 1885–1900

Summary

By 1885, the British policy in respect of the affairs of West Africa which put Britain's political and economic interests first and the campaign against the slave trade second was already decades old. The acceptance by the Berlin West Africa Conference of British prior territorial claims in the Bight of Biafra and its hinterland was not based on any arguments produced by Britain showing the vigor and intensity of its activities against the slave trade and slave traders in the region. On the contrary, it was anchored on the fact that Britain was able to convince the diplomats at Berlin that its economic interests there were dominant. More particularly, it was able to mount an apparently irrefutable demonstration, by means of so-called treaties of protection entered into with supposed local potentates of the Bight of Biafra and its environs, that it was in a position to give adequate protection to legitimate European economic and other interests in the whole area. In the event, when Britain in 1885 declared a protectorate over the region which it now called the Oil Rivers, it was done to leave its European rivals and friends in no doubt that Britain was able and ready to live up to the international obligations it had committed itself to at Berlin, and not necessarily because it was itching to advance the movement for the abolition of the internal slave trade. Consequently, there was very little of what Britain accomplished in the life of the peoples of the Bight and its hinterland in the period covered by this chapter that was specifically calculated to achieve the extirpation of the internal traffic. The main focus of attention was to effectively establish the British presence, to define the nature and determine the structure of that presence, and to protect and advance the trading interests of British subjects there—in short, to firmly install and see to the expansion of what was called the pax Britannica.

Yet it would be a distortion of history to deny that the installation of the pax Britannica and its subsequent extension into the interior eventually led to the withering away of the evil traffic.