III - Senegambia in the first half of the nineteenth century: legitimate trade and sovereignty disputes

Summary

The first half of the nineteenth century saw another round of major upheavals that changed all aspects of life in Senegambia. The slave trade had dominated preceding centuries. Colonial conquest would come in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was a time of transition, marked by the triumph of legitimate trade.

The 1814 Congress of Vienna signaled the resurgence of British and French power in Senegambia after a long eclipse due to the Imperial Wars. This resurgence coincided with a gradual transition from commercial mercantilism to industrial capitalism. The shift enabled Europe to impose new forms of domination over the pre-capitalist economies of the African periphery. From the start, Britain, committed to the new doctrine of free trade because it was the leading industrial nation, abolished the slave trade once it lost its usefulness as an instrument for primitive capital accumulation. Senegambia, after three centuries of uninterrupted slave trading, acquired a new function: to devote itself exclusively to the supply of raw materials and agricultural produce to Europe, and to use the proceeds for buying the manufactured products of the European industrial system, then in a state of full-scale expansion.