ABSTRACT
The ceremonial dialogue of trade negotiation does not obscure the power relations implicit in this missionary armada, designed as it was to awaken Africans “to a sense of their own degradation” (4 7). Eric Williams and others have suggested that abolitionist blockades and trade expeditions in fact prepared the way for the full-scale colonization of Africa, developing markets for English products and accumulating information about local conditions in these exploratory forays (Williams 1972; Cell 1979). Both Dickens and the official Narrative represent the free trade of empire, or “general unrestricted commerce with Great Britain,” as “innocent” in contrast to the un-English monopoly in slaves attributed to Obi. Dickens’ essay, seven years after the event, however, turns out to be not a defense of the premises of the Expedition but a violent repudiation of “the heated visions o f philanthropists for the rail road Christianisation of Africa, and the abolition of the Slave Trade” (62).
