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 Periodical article |
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| Title: | The Baltimore/Pongo Connection: American Entrepreneurism, Colonial Expansionism, or African Opportunism? |
| Author: | Mouser, B.L. |
| Year: | 2000 |
| Periodical: | International Journal of African Historical Studies |
| Volume: | 33 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Pages: | 313-333 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Guinea United Kingdom United States |
| Subjects: | colonial conquest colonists freedmen History and Exploration Economics and Trade colonialism |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/220651 |
| Abstract: | Early American commerce on the West African coast focused upon a section bordered by the Gambia River to the north and Cape Palmas to the south. For a limited area, the Rio Nunez to Iles de Los region of present-day Guinea, a prominent American presence was accepted by the British between 1794 and 1818. In the early 1820s, however, after the American Colonization Society had established a settlement at what was to become Liberia, the British began to see American actions in settling free and freed African-Americans as part of a covert attempt to undercut British power in the area. As a result, the British accused American commercial and emigrationist interests of planning outright encirclement and subversion. This article explores a scheme by Baltimore-based abolitionists, emigrationists, and business interests after 1820 to establish an exclusive monopolistic relationship with some commercial and political leaders in the area of the Pongo and Nunez rivers. It also examines the objectives in and objection toward such a relationship from peoples based on the African coast. It shows that the failure of an exclusive commercial arrangement between the scheme's proponents, on both sides of the Atlantic, reflected poor planning, missed opportunities, unclear or unrealistic objectives, reliance on the success of too few persons, and concrete opposition from British officials on the African coast. Notes, ref. |
