9 - Keeping Colonialism in the Family

Summary

This chapter examines the sponsorship by the politically powerful Buxton family of the disastrous Niger expedition, which sought to harness medical advances, new geographic knowledge and the power of steamships, to send three steamships down the River Niger to negotiate treaties with African chiefs whereby chiefs would agree to end the slave trade and in return receive trade boats from Britain. Secretly, the expedition was also supposed to purchase territory and lay the foundations for a cotton plantation funded by British investors. The chapter examines the extent to which the expedition was a family enterprise, as well as exploring the ideological assumptions of the expedition, opposition to it, and the importance of the marriage between humanitarianism and colonialism that it represented. The failure of the expedition marked a turning point in the power of abolitionist families. For example, the expedition was opposed by Chartist activists in the name of popular power and opposition to the focus of elite families on suffering others overseas rather than on the British poor. Debate over the Niger Expedition thus presaged the growth of settler populism, and marked an important turning point in the history of empire, kinship and violence told by this book.