The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a rise in new colonial projects and exploration.
Geopolitics and Enlightenment ideas of progress pushed Europe’s colonial empires towards hitherto neglected parts of the world. The French Crown, for instance, launched an extensive colonial venture based on European settlement in French Guiana after ceding most of Canada and North America to Britain in 1763.
A few years later, the Comte de Maudave attempted to found a French slave-free colony in Madagascar.1 Britain embarked on similar quests in this period. Whether or not its colonial aspirations saw a veritable ‘Swing to the East’ after 1783, as some historians claim, Britain was certainly keen to explore alternative regions for empire-building after American independence.2 Such colonial exploration, moreover, was not confined to the major powers. Smaller European powers, such as Denmark, also ventured forth and were sometimes even at the forefront of such measures, just as Denmark was the first European power to abolish its slave trade.This chapter will examine three colonial projects on the West African coast in the period of the 1780s and the 1790s. Launched by Britain, Denmark and France during the peak of the slave trade, the three projects were intended to go against the grain of slave-trading and focus on the development and cultivation of Africa, rather than on plunder. Scholars have begun to consider the meaning of such colonial projects in Africa, pointing to their significance in setting an example for Europe’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonisation on this continent.3 So far, however, the focus has been on single powers, thus neglecting to emphasise how these projects occurred in a trans-imperial context of emulation and competition. Yet this larger context needs to be brought into view to appreciate fully the historical significance of these projects. Accordingly, what follows is an attempt to shed light on and compare British, Danish and French colonial projects in Africa at a time when that continent was slowly becoming a promising region for Europe’s neo-colonial and imperial ambitions.
More on the topic The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a rise in new colonial projects and exploration.:
- The Uniate Church in Right-Bank Ukraine in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century: Paradoxes of Regional Adaptation
- Colonies and the slave trade in the second half of the eighteenth century
- Regimental Cities of the Hetmanate in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: Governance, Economy, Demography
- Population Distribution of the City of Poltava in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century by Age, Sex, and Marital Status
- Orthodox Colleges in the Russian Empire (Second Half of the Eighteenth to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century): Between Traditions and Innovations
- For three and a half centuries Europeans extended the bounds of their overseas possessions. In the half century that commenced in the 1770s the scope of imperial holdings shrank dramatically.
- British, Danish and French colonial projects on the coast of West Africa, 1780s and 1790s
- Three Eighteenth-Century Travellers
- 24 The Right Bank and Western Ukraine in the Eighteenth Century
- Homicide in Eighteenth-Century China
- I have been working in international development for almost half a century.
- SECTION G THE ORGANS OF GOVERNMENT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY