What brought the British to the Gambia in the first place - which was bigger than it is now - was trade in ivory because the Gambia had a lot of elephants. They wiped out all the elephants and ended up selling Africans.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There was free trade in Africa. There was free enterprise in Africa before the colonialists came.
England was the first true colonial power to use its dominion over a large part of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, North America, and many Caribbean islands, in the first half of the 20th century.
Africa has become the big game of the nation hunters. Today, Africa looms as the greatest commercial, industrial and political prize in the world.
What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?
In Africa, we have the bush meat trade, which means that, on a very large scale, animals are being killed in the forests and sold in the cities as a luxury food.
The reason why Botswana has done very well is because it's the only black African country which went back to its roots and built upon its own indigenous institutions.
Because of the long, long history of British shipping, immigration, trade, empire, missionaries, you can have a better shot at telling a worldwide story in the British Museum's collection than any other. Britain has been more connected with the rest of the world than any other country, for longer.
Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.
The British merchants represented that they received some profit indeed from Virginia and South Carolina, as well as the West Indies; but as for the rest of this continent, they were constant losers in trade.
I grew up in South Africa, but like many people at that time, I couldn't bear living in the country. The main motivation for moving to Britain was to get away.