The Lagos Consulate, 1851–1861: An outline

Abstract

The British reduction of Lagos in 1851, their establishment of a semi-protectorate under the consuls, and the annexation of 1861 were due to a complex of causes, partly British, partly African: the movement to suppress the slave trade and to prevent its revival under the guise of contract labour; the encouragement of legitimate trade; the need to protect British and immigrant interests; missionary ambition; French rivalry; the rift in and subsequent weakness of the monarchy; the disordered state of the interior; the Dahomean threat to Abeokuta. Benjamin Campbell, the first substantive consul, laid the foundations of British rule, while his short-lived successors Brand and Foote helped to persuade the British Government that it was desirable and feasible to effect the transition to a colony. The consular decade at Lagos was a time of change which foreshadowed many of the issues of the Partition and was the first step in the making of Nigeria.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.