Conclusion

Abstract

The conclusion revisits the key findings of the previous chapters. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of increased British presence in West Africa and one in which traditional normative commercial patterns with African polities were challenged through the introduction of new legal techniques and the re-interpretation of old ones. Such experimentation with legal techniques was often haphazard, improvisational, and a process of trial and error which escaped the control of the metropole and in which local protagonists took centre-stage. International legal discourse was characteristically open-ended, which allowed imperial protagonists to apply legal norms as much as possible to the benefit of varied imperial objectives. These findings paints a vastly different and more nuanced picture of British empire-building that has traditionally relied on a limited set of sources and particularly on the discourse of late nineteenth-century legal scholars.