West Africa at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century
The political, economic and cultural landscape of the Grain Coast before the permanent American settlement.
This chapter opens with the state of the evidence. Where the American Colonization Society's own record survives in agent correspondence and the pages of the African Repository, it is read against the archives of the colonial and republican governments in Monrovia, British and United States naval papers, and the oral traditions preserved by the communities of the Grain Coast. No single body of documents is treated as authoritative on its own.
The record
The documentary sources for west africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century are uneven. Settler and society records are abundant, continuous and self-interested; African records for the same events are transmitted through lineage histories, chiefly succession accounts and the testimony gathered by later administrators and ethnographers. Reading them together does not resolve every contradiction, but it establishes which claims are supported by more than one independent tradition.
Interpretation
The argument advanced here is that the events of this chapter cannot be understood as a single transaction or a single decision. They were the outcome of overlapping systems of authority — African collective land custody, chiefly negotiation, American philanthropic and racial policy, and the coercive presence of naval power — that understood the same words to mean different things.
Consequences
What follows from this chapter is carried forward into the constitutional and territorial history of the republic. The ambiguity was never resolved by the parties; it was inherited by the state formed in 1847 and remains present in Liberian debates over land, citizenship and national memory.
Draft text. Sources for this chapter are listed under References and may be revised by the editorial team.