Preface

Summary

This work is a history of the campaign that was waged by Great Britain in colonial Nigeria from about 1885 onward, to abolish the internal slave trade in the Bight of Biafra and its hinterland; a region also known as Eastern Nigeria, southeastern Nigeria, the Eastern Provinces or the trans-Niger provinces. To put it differently, it is the study of a policy and the attempt to implement that policy in practice as well as the study of the resistance to it by those against whom it was directed (or is it in whose interest it was designed?). It treats the internal slave trade and the war against it in this region and period as a separate theme from the institution of slavery in the same area and the campaign to root it out generally known as emancipation. For this reason, and because slavery and the effort at emancipation have received more (though be it said still inadequate) attention from scholars, the work concentrates entirely on the aspect of the slave trade and its fortunes under British colonial rule commonly known as abolition. In its own way, therefore, the work is, for southeastern Nigeria or the Bight of Biafra and its hinterland, a continuation of Sir Christopher Lloyd's The Navy and the Slave Trade. It is also the completion of it. Instead of the Royal Navy and consuls on the one side, and European slave traders on the other, we now have on the official side the entire colonial establishment and on the other the indigenous slave traders of southeastern Nigeria.

As is well known, our area of interest came into prominence as a rich source of slaves during the Atlantic slave trade and as a major battle zone between the British Preventive Squadron and unrepentant slave dealers between about 1807 and 1860. Most of the available history books on the region for this period, when they touch at all on this human tragedy, have been content to recycle the information that the campaign against the evil in the Atlantic had actually led initially to increased slave dealing in the hinterland and along the coast. This information was first made public in 1864, during the sittings of the British Parliamentary Select Committee on West Africa, by Sir Richard Burton, who gave evidence before it.