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Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen's African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery
Автор: David Lambert
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In Mastering the Niger, David Lambert recalls Scotsman James MacQueen (1778–1870) and his publication of A New Map of Africa in 1841 to show that Atlantic slavery—as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth, and a focus of political struggle—was entangled with the production, circulation, and reception of geographical knowledge. The British empire banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery itself in 1833, creating a need for a new British imperial economy. Without ever setting foot on the continent, MacQueen took on the task of solving the “Niger problem,” that is, to successfully map the course of the river and its tributaries, and thus breathe life into his scheme for the exploration, colonization, and commercial exploitation of West Africa.
Lambert illustrates how MacQueen’s geographical research began, four decades before the publication of the New Map, when he was managing a sugar estate on the West Indian colony of Grenada. There MacQueen encountered slaves with firsthand knowledge of West Africa, whose accounts would form the basis of his geographical claims. Lambert examines the inspirations and foundations for MacQueen’s geographical theory as well as its reception, arguing that Atlantic slavery and ideas for alternatives to it helped produce geographical knowledge, while geographical discourse informed the struggle over slavery.
Lambert illustrates how MacQueen’s geographical research began, four decades before the publication of the New Map, when he was managing a sugar estate on the West Indian colony of Grenada. There MacQueen encountered slaves with firsthand knowledge of West Africa, whose accounts would form the basis of his geographical claims. Lambert examines the inspirations and foundations for MacQueen’s geographical theory as well as its reception, arguing that Atlantic slavery and ideas for alternatives to it helped produce geographical knowledge, while geographical discourse informed the struggle over slavery.
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Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen's African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery
Автор: David Lambert
Описание
In Mastering the Niger, David Lambert recalls Scotsman James MacQueen (1778–1870) and his publication of A New Map of Africa in 1841 to show that Atlantic slavery—as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth, and a focus of political struggle—was entangled with the production, circulation, and reception of geographical knowledge. The British empire banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery itself in 1833, creating a need for a new British imperial economy. Without ever setting foot on the continent, MacQueen took on the task of solving the “Niger problem,” that is, to successfully map the course of the river and its tributaries, and thus breathe life into his scheme for the exploration, colonization, and commercial exploitation of West Africa.
Lambert illustrates how MacQueen’s geographical research began, four decades before the publication of the New Map, when he was managing a sugar estate on the West Indian colony of Grenada. There MacQueen encountered slaves with firsthand knowledge of West Africa, whose accounts would form the basis of his geographical claims. Lambert examines the inspirations and foundations for MacQueen’s geographical theory as well as its reception, arguing that Atlantic slavery and ideas for alternatives to it helped produce geographical knowledge, while geographical discourse informed the struggle over slavery.
Lambert illustrates how MacQueen’s geographical research began, four decades before the publication of the New Map, when he was managing a sugar estate on the West Indian colony of Grenada. There MacQueen encountered slaves with firsthand knowledge of West Africa, whose accounts would form the basis of his geographical claims. Lambert examines the inspirations and foundations for MacQueen’s geographical theory as well as its reception, arguing that Atlantic slavery and ideas for alternatives to it helped produce geographical knowledge, while geographical discourse informed the struggle over slavery.
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Mastering the Niger - David Lambert
DAVID LAMBERT is a reader of Caribbean history in the Department of History at the University of Warwick, UK, and director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2013 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2013.
Printed in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07806-9 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07823-6 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226078236.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lambert, David (Historian)
Mastering the Niger : James MacQueen’s African geography and the struggle over Atlantic slavery / David Lambert.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-07806-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-07823-6 (e-book)
1. Niger River—Discovery and exploration—British. 2. Slave trade—Africa. 3. MacQueen, James, 1778–1870. I. Title.
DT360.L24 2013
916.6204'1—dc23
2013014686
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
MASTERING THE NIGER
James MacQueen’s African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery
DAVID LAMBERT
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
CONTENTS
List of Figures
1. Mastering the Niger
Part One: Sources
2. Mr. Park’s Book
and the Niger Problem
3. Keeping Account of Atlantic Commerce
4. Captive Knowledge
Part Two: Courses
5. Credibility and Truth Making in the Atlantic World
6. Surveying Sierra Leone
7. Thomas Fowell Buxton and the Niger Expedition
Part Three: Termination
8. Beyond the Niger
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
FIGURES
Fig. 1. James MacQueen, A New Map of Africa (1841)
Fig. 2. Photograph of a plaster bust of James MacQueen executed by Edgar Boehm (1882)
Fig. 3. Map of the North Atlantic world, c.1800
Fig. 4. James MacQueen, A Map of Africa North of the Parallel of 7° South Latitude . . . Glasgow 6 June 1820
(1821)
Fig. 5. James Rennell, A Map, Shewing the Progress of Discovery & Improvement, in the Geography of North Africa
(1798)
Fig. 6. Christian Gottlieb Reichard, Probe-Charte
(1803)
Fig. 7. James MacQueen, "A Map of the Country from Vittoria to Thoulouse [sic] the Field of the Operations of the Allied Armies Commanded by the Duke of Wellington in 1813 and 1814" (1815)
Fig. 8. Map of the City of Glasgow and Suburbs
(1822)
Fig. 9. James MacQueen, General Statistics of the British Empire (1836), p. 214
Fig. 10. Accounts of Westerhall estate from 1st January 1796 to 31st December 1797 with continuation to 30th June 1798
Fig. 11. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, November 1817, p. 238
Fig. 12. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, February 1818, p. 599
Fig. 13. Daniel Paterson, A New Plan of the Island of Grenada (1780)
Fig. 14. List of slaves belonging to Westerhall, 13 July 1798
Fig. 15. Sketch of a memorial, sculpted by Anthony Cardon, to those killed during Fédon’s Rebellion (1799)
Fig. 16. Kenneth Macaulay, The Colony of Sierra Leone Vindicated from the Misrepresentations of Mr. Macqueen of Glasgow (1827), p. 21
Fig. 17. James MacQueen, Civilization of Africa: Sierra Leone,
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1827, p. 324
Fig. 18. Kenneth Macaulay, The Colony of Sierra Leone Vindicated from the Misrepresentations of Mr. Macqueen of Glasgow (1827), p. iv
Fig. 19. James MacQueen, Africa North of the Equator Showing the Course & Direction of the Principal Rivers and Mountains Particularly of the Niger and Its Tributary Streams from the Best Authorities
(1826)
Fig. 20. Map of Central Africa
in Thomas Fowell Buxton, The Remedy (1840)
Fig. 21. James MacQueen, Map of Africa from Loanda in the South to Tripoli in the North
(1840)
Fig. 22. James MacQueen, The Delta of the River Kowara or Quorra, the Antient Niger (1839)
Fig. 23. West Coast of Africa. Cape Formosa to Fernando Po. Surveyed by Captain W. F. W. Owen, R.N., 1826
(1841)
CHAPTER ONE
Mastering the Niger
In 1841, the geographer James MacQueen published A New Map of Africa, later described by the President of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) as the first approaching to correctness, of the interior
(figure 1).¹ The map was dedicated and presented to Prince Albert, and was among a number of donations made to the RGS that helped MacQueen to be elected a Fellow of the Society in 1845.
The scope and ambition of the map were the culmination of more than two decades of published work on Africa. MacQueen’s researches had initially been inspired by the efforts of the explorer Mungo Park. Park had been engaged by the African Association in the 1790s to determine the course and termination of the River Niger, and thus to solve the Niger problem
that dominated British interest in West Africa from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Park would not be the first Briton sent to West Africa in this period, nor the only to die in the course of exploring the region. MacQueen’s own contribution to solving the Niger problem was his assertion that the river terminated in the Atlantic Ocean, a claim manifest in the first of his published maps of Africa in 1820. This map and those that followed not only represented Africa as an object of geographical inquiry to be mastered, but also proclaimed its importance as a site of commercial opportunity and a potential imperial territory. The rivers depicted on the map were the means of access for British trading interests, connecting the African interior to distant commercial and political centers, and integrating the continent into a wider British Atlantic empire. Indeed, over more than twenty years, MacQueen used maps to make the case for such a Niger scheme to merchants, politicians, and the British public. In so doing, he reflected and encapsulated a wider British interest in West Africa that was simultaneously commercial and geographical.
Figure 1: James MacQueen, A New Map of Africa (London, 1841). © The British Library Board, MAPS 63510.(14).
The vision of MacQueen’s New Map also underlay the contemporaneous Niger Expedition (1841–42), which was championed by the antislavery leader Thomas Fowell Buxton and backed by the government. Following on from the ending of slavery across the British empire in the 1830s, the expedition sought to attack slavery in Africa itself and undermine the continuing trans-Atlantic slave trade to non-British territories by promoting legitimate commerce.
² MacQueen’s geographical knowledge of and vision for Africa were central to this objective and to the public case that Buxton made. The New Map showed the Niger up which the expedition was to travel, sign anti–slave trade treaties with local African rulers, and establish a model farm at the supposedly healthy confluence of the Niger and its main tributary. MacQueen worked closely with Buxton and, although the Niger Expedition was a disaster, it was the nearest he came to having his African scheme realized. The coming together of commercial and humanitarian motives in the expedition—and in their collaboration—was a forerunner of the later Victorian civilizing mission.
Indeed, MacQueen’s New Map is a precursor for the travels of the missionary-explorer David Livingstone and the later Scramble for Africa,
as well as the culmination of the earlier effort to solve the Niger problem.
The need to promote legitimate commerce with Africa and suppress the slave trade to the Americas was something that MacQueen and Buxton agreed on, yet the former’s relationship with Atlantic slavery was more complex than this suggests. While the New Map was aligned with Buxton’s humanitarian project, MacQueen’s earlier geographical work had been part of his efforts to discredit other antislavery schemes, particularly the free labor settlement at Sierra Leone on the West African coast. MacQueen had been one of the most trenchant and vociferous proslavery propagandists during the debate about British colonial slavery in the 1820s and early 1830s, something that reflected his own involvement in trans-Atlantic commerce as a West Indian plantation manager, merchant, and slaveowner. The slavery debate in which he participated encompassed claims and counter-claims not only about the Caribbean, but also about other parts of the Atlantic world. Accounts by on-the-spot
observers, be they West African explorers or missionaries, colonists, and slaves in the West Indies, were used by metropolitan commentators like MacQueen and his antislavery opponents in their struggle over the future of Atlantic slavery.
Despite the volume of his African work and the confidence with which he mapped the Niger, MacQueen never once visited the continent. Instead, the New Map and those that preceded it were based on collating recent and historical authorities to produce synthetic surveys. The sedentary research of such an armchair
explorer was not accepted by those who set more store by field observation, however. As a result, MacQueen spent the decade after 1820 trying to persuade others to accept that he had solved
the Niger problem and, after a British expedition finally traveled down the Niger to the sea in 1830, the decade after that trying to win credit for the priority of his discoveries.
The New Map was part of this continuing effort to establish himself as an African expert. Yet, if MacQueen made much of his ability to map Africa without traveling there, his proslavery propaganda turned on dismissing those antislavery campaigners who claimed to know the West Indies from distance or on the basis of information from itinerant missionaries. MacQueen had lived and worked in the Caribbean for more than a decade and insisted that long-term residence was the only way to understand the danger that emancipation posed to colonial societies and to British mastery of the Atlantic world. MacQueen’s dual role as a West Indian apologist and West African expert thus reveals not only the connections between discourses of geography and slavery, but also the complex and sometimes contradictory basis on which claims were made about the Atlantic world.
MacQueen’s geographical researches had begun four decades before the publication of the New Map when he was managing a sugar estate in the West Indian colony of Grenada. There he had encountered and had sought to master enslaved people with first-hand knowledge and experience of West Africa. MacQueen realized that these enslaved informants could help to solve the Niger problem and they formed the basis of his geographical claims. Although the traces of this captive knowledge are hidden and overwritten in MacQueen’s work, the New Map is partly a product of these exiled lives. It is also a reminder that the system of Atlantic slavery was the basis of MacQueen’s livelihood and geographical expertise. The New Map thus represents a troubling chain of links by which enslaved knowledge gathered on a Caribbean plantation became the foundation for a commercial and humanitarian expedition to attack slavery in Africa.
The central argument of Mastering the Niger is that Atlantic slavery as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth, and a focus of political struggle was entangled with the production, circulation, and reception of geographical knowledge. To this end, I will show that the debate over slavery was informed by, and involved the deployment of, geographical discourses, practices, and representational forms, including maps and regional surveys. The comparison of the British West Indian slave societies with other parts of the Caribbean as well as places elsewhere in the Atlantic world was one aspect of this. Beyond such substantive claims and counter-claims, more abstract arguments were also staged about how it was possible to obtain knowledge about different Atlantic places and who was best placed to do so: long-standing inhabitants, itinerant visitors, or distant commentators. I argue that this question of locational authority was a profound part of the debate about slavery that related not to the content of the arguments made, but to how they could be credible. In Mastering the Niger, I also argue that Atlantic slavery shaped geographical inquiries into Africa. The most profound example was the knowledge gathered from the enslaved Africans who formed the basis of MacQueen’s Niger claims. Moreover, I argue that ways of understanding commerce that were particularly associated with Atlantic slavery also found expression in how geographical knowledge of Africa was produced and made credible. In a broader sense, involvement in Atlantic slavery had shaped European knowledge about Africa in that the continental interior was relatively unknown. I will show that plans and proposals for alternatives to slavery, such as legitimate commerce, free labor settlements, and the suppression of the slave trade, created a need for new knowledge of Africa to be acquired through exploration and the collation of existing geographical sources. In short, Atlantic slavery and ideas for alternatives to it were productive of geographical knowledge, while geographical discourse informed the struggle over slavery.
No person better encapsulates the entangled nature of geographical knowledge and the struggle over slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than the creator of the New Map, James MacQueen (figure 2). Indeed, the central concerns of Mastering the Niger are the West African facts and theories he promulgated, especially his claims about the course and termination of the River Niger, and his proposals for increased British presence in Africa that were founded on these claims. MacQueen argued that this river flowed to the Atlantic Ocean at least a decade before this was proven to general European satisfaction by on-the-spot explorers. He derived his initial knowledge about African geography from the enslaved people he managed on a Caribbean plantation. After that experience, he became a Glasgow merchant with trans-Atlantic commercial interests, a highprofile critic of the British antislavery campaign, and an outspoken advocate for the colonization of Africa. He deployed geographical knowledge, methods, and genres, including maps, surveys, and statistics, to further these entangled agendas. His claims about Africa and the responses they received from the British government, merchants, antislavery campaigners, explorers, and other geographers demonstrate how geographical discourse played an important role in contemporary debates about empire, slavery, and the nature of knowledge at this time.
To examine the wider significance of MacQueen’s work, I situate him in the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An increasingly interconnected oceanic region emerged in the sixteenth century through trade and communication, migration—voluntary and coerced, permanent and temporary—territorial acquisition by expansionist European states, and modes of governance and law. It was constituted by kaleidoscopic movements
of people and goods, particularly by the trade in and enslavement of African people, as well as the trade in slave-produced commodities.³ Ideas, ideologies, discourses, and epistemologies also circulated, some helping to underwrite systems of empire and commerce, others emerging in opposition to them.⁴ Although the Atlantic world was centered on an oceanic system connecting the Americas, Africa, and Europe, including the colonies of the Caribbean, flows of trade and information also extended into continental interiors via trade routes, and also connected to other oceanic systems, especially in the Indian Ocean.⁵ Within this world, particular locations played a key role as sources of goods, sites of consumption, places of knowledge exchange, and centers of command. These included islands like Grenada in the Caribbean and Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea, cities like Glasgow and London, and colonial settlements such as Sierra Leone. Moreover, rivers like the Niger connected this ocean-centered world to continental interiors and land-locked cities like Timbuktu.
Figure 2: Photograph of a plaster bust of James MacQueen executed by Edgar Boehm (1882). According to the RGS Museum catalogue, c. 1914, the bust itself was kept in the Tea Room around this time, but does not seem to have survived to the present. By permission of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
MacQueen was very much a figure of the Atlantic. He lived and made a living in cities with strong Atlantic (and global) connections—first Glasgow and later London. He crossed the ocean several times, initially settling in the Caribbean for more than a decade and later visiting the United States. Moreover, although he never traveled to Africa, he maintained strong interests in the continent throughout his life. By the late eighteenth century, Britain’s Atlantic empire was beginning to change and fragment because of the effects of the American Revolution, and further disruptions would follow in the wake of the French and Haitian Revolutions. Understandably, such revolutionary forces have received much attention.⁶ MacQueen, however, represented a counter-revolutionary Atlantic, in that he sought to maintain and reinvigorate Britain’s geopolitical position.⁷ He did so by opposing changes to the Caribbean, especially the abolition of slavery, defending mercantilism and protectionist policies, and lobbying for governmental support for new colonial ventures in Africa in order to provide sources of raw materials and markets for British goods. I will sketch out MacQueen’s life later. For now, suffice to say that through his maps, geographical surveys, and presentation of statistical data, as well as his trading, lobbying, and journalism, Mac-Queen sought to ensure British mastery of the Atlantic world.
The specific historical focus of Mastering the Niger is from the late 1780s to the mid-1840s, a period that encompasses three overlapping chronologies: from the emergence of the British antislavery campaign to the peak of humanitarian influence on the early Victorian state; the intensification of British exploratory activity in West Africa, the solution of the so-called Niger problem, and the subsequent commercial and humanitarian expeditions up this river; and the institutionalization of British geography as a field of knowledge and set of practices. The period also includes Christopher Bayly’s imperial meridian,
a period that has been characterized in terms of a swing to the east
following the revolutionary rupture of the first
English empire, centered on the Atlantic, and the rise of a second
British empire in Asia.⁸ Africa, too, took on new significance at this time.⁹ Part of this interest stemmed from growing disquiet over slavery and utopian designs to establish alternatives in Africa, but also crucial was a desire to develop new markets for Britain’s growing industry and to expand the country’s commercial and colonial reach. The rise of abolitionist and commercial interests in Africa were not directly connected, although both can be related to the fallout of American independence and there were significant links between them. None of these chronologies exactly match my own, but all are of relevance.¹⁰ Moreover, parts of my argument spill over these boundaries, extending back to consider older forms of British involvement and interest in Africa, as well as early modern
modes of geographical enquiry and writing.¹¹ In the final part of the book, Termination,
I also look forward to the Victorian period and the increasing European presence in Africa.
THE WAR OF REPRESENTATION
OVER ATLANTIC SLAVERY
The rise of abolitionist sentiment toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the response from those with interests in maintaining the Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement of people of African descent in the British empire, created a field of political and cultural contention. The struggle over slavery comprised abolitionist and antislavery campaigning—spearheaded initially by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (founded 1787) and later by the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions (founded 1823)—and proslavery lobbying and obstruction. As one of the great debates of the age, the issue of slavery brought to the fore questions about human difference, moral duty, free trade, colonial rights, and Britain’s imperial future.
The struggle over Atlantic slavery was what Catherine Hall has termed a war of representation.
It took place over a variegated terrain: arguments about the nature of people of African descent were clearly of great importance, but the character of the white West Indian planter was also debated. At stake was the question as to the truth about the system of slavery
and, from 1823 in particular, both supporters and opponents of slavery sought to appeal to and mobilize public opinion. Hall notes that the war of representation took place on many sites: in the press, in pamphlets, in fiction, in poetry, in paintings and engravings, in public meetings.
¹² Yet beyond these textual, visual, and performative sites were a series of worldly spaces in and about which the war of representation was fought. The main worldly focus was the Caribbean itself, but other places featured too, including the East Indies, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and West Africa more broadly. Hence, the struggle over Atlantic slavery was fought across multiple theatres, some lying far beyond the Caribbean.¹³ Comparisons between different worldly sites were common, with abolitionists seeking to establish and emphasize the cultural and moral difference of Caribbean slavedom from metropolitan British society, while their opponents asserted the essential unity of the British Atlantic world, the loyalty of the West Indies, and the duty of care that Britain owed to its colonies. This differentiation between a ‘slave world’ aberration
and a metropolitan ‘free world’ norm
—asserted by humanitarians, contested by defenders of slavery like MacQueen—was one of the key spatial features in the war of representation.¹⁴ More fine-grained distinctions were also made. For example, proslavery writers contrasted supposedly ordered and productive West Indian colonies with Haiti, which was made to serve as a portent for what might happen after emancipation. On the other side of the Atlantic, the West African colony of Sierra Leone was represented by humanitarians as a kind of anti-Caribbean space, a free African labor experiment, and an antislavery colony, and thus was targeted by supporters of slavery determined to prove it a failure.
West Africa was a key site in the struggle over Atlantic slavery, not least as explorers like Park were sent there in the late eighteenth century and published accounts of their travels.¹⁵ Yet, there was also an older debate on Africa
that preceded formal campaigning around slavery. George Boulukos traces its origins to the New Account of Some Parts of Guinea (1734),¹⁶ written by the English slave trader William Snelgrave, which provided many of the stock images and anecdotes that were still cited by supporters of Atlantic slavery more than fifty years later. Among the most important was Snelgrave’s account of cannibalism and sacrifice in West Africa that apologists for slavery like Bryan Edwards later cited to argue that the trans-Atlantic slave trade rescued
African captives from a worse fate.¹⁷ Snelgrave was rebutted by Anthony Benezet, a pioneer of abolition, who sought to articulate a more positive image of Africa and blamed the European slave trade for African depravities, a claim that would be influential on subsequent antislavery writing.¹⁸
As this sketch of the intertextual nature of this debate on Africa suggests, the war of representation over Atlantic slavery was fought not only in worldly and textual sites, but also across them, as those on both sides cited earlier accounts and made comparative points to substantiate their arguments. Explorers like Park were quoted in Parliament, and abolitionist poetry cited travel accounts.¹⁹ For example, Thomas Day’s The dying negro,
published originally in 1773 and an important early antislavery poem that helped set the tone and shape the conventions for many to follow,
was supposedly based on a true story.²⁰ The poem imagines the African man’s dying final soliloquy and helped establish the sentimental theme of the pathetic, suicidal slave,
while also asserting the humanity and equal rights of Africans. As well as helping to articulate an idealised, primitivist vision of Africa,
the poem cites a number of on-the-spot accounts, some of which themselves cited earlier works.²¹ Such intertextuality was not simply a manifestation of a search for external facts,
but also a means of asserting the credibility of the claims being made about Atlantic slavery that reveals the citational character of much of the war of representation. Rather than making arguments purely in terms of abstract principles, many protagonists drew on first-hand observations of slavery in Africa, the Caribbean, and beyond, circulating them through different media and repeating them in public or private meetings to establish their credibility and with the ultimate intention to bring about or stave off change. Chains of intertextual authority were used in attempts to break or reinforce the bonds of enslavement. Thus, the war of representation was fought out simultaneously on and across the sites of the page (including the map and the table of figures) and the world.
MacQueen’s role in the struggle over Atlantic slavery was as a proslavery propagandist and theorist. Much is known of the political and intellectual origins of the British antislavery movement, but the thought and ideas of those who opposed emancipation have attracted less interest, especially in the period after the abolition of the slave trade.²² Often it is assumed that these were self-interested apologists prepared to say anything to defend their livelihoods or simply the paid agents of such individuals. Antislavery campaigners used both accusations to discredit their opponents and MacQueen himself was attacked as a mercenary
paid to spout proslavery propaganda.²³ Yet, even if we assume that pecuniary motivations are less worthy of consideration than religious or philosophical ones, the question remains of how proslavery propagandists articulated their assertions and recast self-interest as general interest and the West Indian interest as the British interest. Racism was one aspect of such proslavery discourse, although in the latter phases of the slavery controversy it was usually implicit. Proslavery arguments tended to eschew abstract theorizing for more grounded, practical arguments that slavery was a necessary evil. Especially from the 1820s onwards, proslavery arguments adopted ameliorationist
language, arguing that slavery should be gradually abolished through successive reforms—a process they alleged was occurring naturally—and expressing their opposition to immediate emancipation. MacQueen certainly did. He was no abstract theorist of racial difference, although it was an underpinning to what he thought and argued, and flashes of racist invective reveal MacQueen’s personal attitude. Moreover, by preferring to defend West Indian slavery on practical grounds—such as its contribution to the imperial Atlantic economy or as necessary to protect settler populations—MacQueen’s proslavery writing was articulated through other discourses, including geographical discourse. By focusing on one of the antislavery movement’s most infamous opponents, Mastering the Niger examines the vexed relationship between interest and credibility, and demonstrates that proslavery arguments were intellectually complex and bound up with exploration, cartography, empire, scientific knowledge, commerce, and Tory political ideology.
Overall, the approach that Mastering the Niger takes to the struggle over Atlantic slavery is to stress the many locations, on the page and in the world, in and across which it took place. I am also interested in how it was entangled with other projects in the Atlantic world, especially in Africa.
THE CLASSIC AGE OF WEST AFRICAN EXPLORATION
I have already noted that Africa, particularly West Africa, was a significant site in the Atlantic war of representation from the late eighteenth century. This period also witnessed the growth of European interest in the continent’s commercial potential and associated with this were efforts to expand geographical knowledge of Africa, especially through exploration. Yet, just as those aspects of the struggle over Atlantic slavery related to Africa were built on older debates, so the late-eighteenth-century interest in the continent drew on long-standing European knowledge.²⁴ Ideas about sub-Saharan Africa were circulating before the era of the Atlantic slave trade, based on Classical authorities rediscovered during the Renaissance, as well as medieval geographers and Arab contacts across the Sahara. Initially, the interior regions of Africa were better known, partly due to the publication of Leo Africanus’ History and Description of Africa in England in 1600, yet increasing trade brought the coastal regions of West Africa into view. There was a new spate of accounts in the eighteenth century, of which Snelgrave’s was one example.²⁵ Nevertheless, the older understanding of African geography had a remarkable tenacity and efforts were made to reconcile field observations with existing authorities. As a result, a Renaissance mapmaking pattern
lasted from the thirteenth century to at least two-thirds into the nineteenth century.²⁶
The main reason that Britons came to Africa in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was for trade, especially the slave trade. From the late eighteenth century, however, new forms of engagement began to develop.²⁷ The African Association, or Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa to give it its full title, was founded in 1788. Dominated by Joseph Banks, this private organization aimed to improve knowledge of African geography and markets by sponsoring expeditions. The hope was that the success of individual explorers would encourage government involvement in the form of larger expeditions and the establishment of trading stations, factories, and plantations. These longterm economic concerns were central to the Association’s efforts from the beginning, but it was also animated by questions of geography, which had important implications for potential commercial schemes.²⁸
The African Association was founded a year after the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and abolitionists joined the African Association, including William Wilberforce and Henry Thornton. It was not an abolitionist organization, however, and its membership also included leading defenders of West Indian slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, such as Bryan Edwards and William Young. William Pulteney was another member, an owner of West Indian plantations, including the estate that MacQueen would manage in Grenada. A founding member of the Association, Pulteney played a central role in the defeat of Wilbeforce’s motion in 1805 to abolish the slave trade.²⁹ Despite such differences, the involvement of people on both sides of the struggle over Atlantic slavery demonstrates some common interests in Africa. This was particularly clear in growing interest in legitimate commerce
as a way of replacing slave trading.
Concurrent with the formal start of the war of representation over slavery was an intense period of exploratory activity, political lobbying, and public interest relating to Africa, which Philip Curtin termed the classic age of West African exploration.
³⁰ The specific issue in this period was the effort to solve the Niger problem—that is, to determine the source, direction of flow, course, and termination of this river.³¹ Yet, if the goal remained constant, the means through which it was pursued did not. The private African Association was replaced by the British state. Park’s second expedition from 1805 was government backed and militarized, and after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, John Barrow, Second Secretary of the Admiralty and a former colonial administrator and traveler, became the leading promoter of British exploratory activity. Moreover, although the solution
of the Niger problem by Richard and John Lander in 1830 marks a convenient end point to this period, it also makes sense to consider the immediate efforts to exploit this new geographical discovery
in, for example, the Niger Expedition of 1841–42.
This phase of West African exploration is best understood not in terms of the actions of individual explorers in the field and their heroic efforts to expand geographical knowledge.³² Those sent out often traveled through populated regions, relying on guides, porters, and interpreters, accompanying merchant caravans and needing the support and goodwill of local rulers. Many made use of long-distance systems of commerce associated with the slave trade to make their way, whether drawing on credit that European merchants had with local slave traders or trading with them to buy provisions. Some even traveled as part of slave coffles. The roles played by Africans and others are part of the hidden histories
of exploration.³³ So too is the impact of the local political and economic contexts in which exploratory activity occurred—matters of which most Europeans explorers were only dimly aware.³⁴ Nor was exploration
in Africa merely a matter of going and seeing unknown
places. Efforts would be made later in the nineteenth century to systematize the gathering of geographical data by travelers. For much of the earlier period, however, it would remain a mixture of talking, soliciting maps, gathering hearsay, as well as actually observing and measuring.³⁵ Much of the geographical knowledge produced through exploratory activity was co-constituted by explorers and those they encountered.³⁶ Such a perspective militates against heroic (or tragic) narratives of individual struggles against adversity, recasting exploration as one of the ways in which diverse and divided societies came into contact in the context of broader economic, political, technological, and epistemological shifts.
As well as being a complex and interpersonal activity, West African exploration was not reducible to what went on during expeditions and in the field. Trips were planned and financed in distant metropolitan sites and the accounts they produced were dissected and digested in such places. Accounts of expeditions circulated not only in official dispatches or published texts, many of them edited and mediated by metropolitan sponsors, but also in a broader print culture made up of novels and poetry, as well as articles and reviews in the periodical press.³⁷ Together this encompassed what Felix Driver terms a culture of exploration,
an idea that highlights how geographical ideas, images, and practices traversed various public realms and became associated with science, literature, religion, commerce and empire
and, not least, with contemporary debates about slavery.³⁸
A broader perspective on the sites where exploration and discovery occurred serves to emphasize the relationship between field explorers and sedentary (or armchair
) geographers in the production of knowledge about distant places, and to problematize too easy a division between them. This is an important theme of Mastering the Niger given that in solving
the Niger problem MacQueen never went to Africa. Yet, there are also implications for how the struggle over Atlantic slavery was fought. By examining MacQueen’s efforts to establish the credibility of his geographical conjectures, while he simultaneously sought to discredit the claims made about Caribbean slavery by abolitionists and the authors of slave narratives, the book interrogates the status of testimony in the overlapping fields of scientific and moral discourse, and the broader process of truth making in the Atlantic world. More generally, my perspective on the classic age of West African exploration shares much with how I approach the struggle over Atlantic slavery. In both cases, I am attentive to the spaces, places, and sites in which knowledge was produced, through which it circulated, and in which it was consumed and contested.³⁹ Both the classic age of West African exploration and the struggle over Atlantic slavery took place in and across many sites in the Atlantic world and beyond; they occasionally featured the same sites or, in the case of MacQueen, involved the same individuals. In both cases, the question of what made knowledge credible was to the fore.
GEOGRAPHY ON THE CUSP OF MODERNITY
The third context for Mastering the Niger is the development of geography in Britain as a field of knowledge and a set of practices. While this is a more specific and limited context than those already discussed, it is significant for two key reasons. First, MacQueen was, and continues to be, known as a geographer.
It was often how he described himself and central to how he understood and sought to master the Niger and wider Atlantic world. Second, the question of how credible geographical knowledge could be produced was emblematic of debates about truth, authority, and distanciated knowledge—claims that were also to be found in the contemporaneous European interest in Africa and debates about Atlantic slavery. Given the centrality of this question to what was understood as geography, the contours of the protodisciplinary debate throw light on the wider, more inchoate field.
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the development and convergence of the scientific, exploratory, and imperial impulses that would serve to institutionalize geography in Britain.⁴⁰ Nowhere was this clearer than in relation to Africa. I have already noted how the African Association sponsored expeditionary activity. It also sought to gather existing knowledge and analyze the new information that stemmed from exploration. To this end, it published a series of maps and surveys, such as those that James Rennell, Britain’s leading geographer, produced to accompany Park’s first journey to Africa. Other bodies also contributed to the promotion of exploratory activity, and the collection and dissemination of geographical knowledge, particularly the humanitarian African Institution and its rival, the African Committee, which oversaw the administration
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