‘Till these Experiments be Made’: Senegambia and British Imperial Policy in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

In late July 1766, the royal governor of Senegambia, Colonel Charles O’Hara, sent a dispatch to London outlining his hopes for the future of the colony. Newly-created out of the British territories on the Senegal and Gambia rivers in West Africa, Senegambia joined New France and the ceded islands of the Caribbean as the fruits of Britain’s triumph during the Seven Years War. O’Hara’s dispatch, while focused on securing funding for explorations of the African interior, captured the considerable ambition of Britain’s overseas administrators in the aftermath of the war. No longer content with the commercial exploitation of labour and raw materials by private traders, O’Hara suggested the possibility of direct territorial rule in West Africa. Senegambia was to be an experiment in which commercial networks would be exploited not just for economic gain but also for political hegemony. O’Hara’s plans chimed with attitudes that were emerging in the metropole. According to this more bellicose reading of the purposes of Britain’s empire, merchants and traders, acting ‘upon Principles of self-interest rather than general advantage’ would not be allowed to disrupt plans to turn Senegambia into a plantation colony on the model of the more than two dozen British colonies that fringed the Atlantic basin. According to O’Hara, all that was required for this plan to be brought to fruition was the protection of the colony by officials in London, ‘at least till these Experiments be made’.1

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