Benevolent Aggression and Exemplary Violence in West Africa

Chapter 4 addresses the hitherto neglected topic of colonial war and use of force in West Africa prior to the end of the nineteenth century. It discusses various instances in which force was used in order to acquire or consolidate control by bolstering and enforcing existing legal techniques. Specific attention is awarded to the justifications that underpinned the use of coercive measures and the excessive and exemplary nature of the violence used against African communities. Aggression was presented as having a benevolent character as the justifications to resort to force started from the premise that the British Empire and its representatives were magnanimous and that violence was used for the betterment of the African. Justifications entailed arguments that hinged on so-called racialized necessity, the furthering of a ‘humanitarian agenda’ or were styled as legitimate responses to African wrong-doings.

British Legal Strategies and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Chapter 2 connects abolitionist efforts to induce the British government to reinvigorate its efforts to suppress the transatlantic slave trade from the 1840s onwards as the catalyst for the creation of new legal tactics. First, within the confines of the Foreign Office, a model standard agreement was devised that was to be concluded with African rulers, which furthered an agenda based on the idea of replacing the slave trade with ‘legitimate commerce’. The model agreement built on an existing tradition of including abolition clauses in treaties since the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Second, the implementation of the model agreement ran parallel to the increase in commercial power and the use of force to suppress the slave trade through the use of naval blockades and the bombardment of the coastline of West Africa.

The Changing Legal Patterns of Anglo-African Relations (1807–40)

Chapter 1 discusses how, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, the use and creation of legal instruments by British imperial agents in West Africa received a first substantial Western reorientation by the increased resort to treaties. British presence increased in a mostly unplanned and haphazard way and was not geared towards creating a land-based empire but to enlarging Britain’s commercial and humanitarian influence in the region. This development went hand in hand with the introduction of new Western-inspired treaty clauses and the pro-British interpretation of traditional rights and obligations. The first experiments were made with instruments that would become characteristic of Britain’s legal strategies in West Africa: treaties of protection, extraterritoriality, mediation, and coercion.

Introduction: Britain and International Law in West Africa

This introduction provides an overview of the main arguments and structure of the book. It introduces the state of the art with respect to the history of international law and empire in West Africa and proposes an approach that relies on the analysis of legal instruments and international legal discourse to contextualize existing narratives. It argues in favour of an approach that moves beyond the traditional focus on treaties that cede sovereignty and territory or on Western legal treatises and that recognizes the inherent scattered nature of empire-building. It explains who the main protagonists of empire-building in West Africa were and the manner in which they employed an international legal ‘vernacular’ to create and interpret legal instruments to further their interests.

Conclusion

The conclusion revisits the key findings of the previous chapters. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of increased British presence in West Africa and one in which traditional normative commercial patterns with African polities were challenged through the introduction of new legal techniques and the re-interpretation of old ones. Such experimentation with legal techniques was often haphazard, improvisational, and a process of trial and error which escaped the control of the metropole and in which local protagonists took centre-stage. International legal discourse was characteristically open-ended, which allowed imperial protagonists to apply legal norms as much as possible to the benefit of varied imperial objectives. These findings paints a vastly different and more nuanced picture of British empire-building that has traditionally relied on a limited set of sources and particularly on the discourse of late nineteenth-century legal scholars.

International Law and the Settlement of Disputes with Regard to West Africa on the Eve of the Scramble (1840–84)

The haphazard nature in which treaties had been concluded sat awkwardly with the Western rules relating to title to territory. Once imperial competition intensified, rival claims with respect to territory needed to be untangled and brought to stark light the contrast between formal international law and its practical imperial ‘vernacular’. Chapter 5 analyses the varied legal responses resorted to by European states to neutralize conflicts that resulted from the helter-skelter creation of imperial legal techniques, which culminated in the organization of the Berlin Conference. It discusses early occurrences of inter-Western arbitration, the conclusion of sphere of influence treaties, and the outcome of the Berlin West Africa Conference. Finally, it highlights how the legal competition between imperial rivals brought to stark light the lack of theoretical legal consistency with regard to imperial state practices.

Extraterritorial Jurisdiction and the Dawn of the Protectorate

Chapter 3 discusses the indiscriminate extension of extraterritoriality by British imperial agents as a defining feature of British imperial legal techniques. From 1843 onwards, it is possible to discern a boom in the legislation providing for the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction and for the creation of consular posts. The term ‘protection’ was an inherent part of the discourse of imperial agents when they referred to the need to extend extraterritorial jurisdiction. In the context of empire, ‘protection’ proved a flexible semiotic tool that often understated the vast extent of intervention that went hand in hand with its use in legal settings. At the same in the meaning of protection as a military alliance implying control over external relations continued to survive and referred to the physical protection of African polities in return for their exclusive relationship with Britain. The growth of extraterritoriality is directly related to the genesis of the ‘colonial’ protectorate as a form of imperial governance.