From Slaves to Gum: Colonial Trade and French-British Rivalry in Eighteenth-Century Senegambia

Abstract

Senegambia provided gum and slaves. Both Britain and France staked out comptoirs (trading posts) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries amidst broader European jockeying in the region. These posts did not allow for direct control of local populations but for zones of economic and political influence, zones that necessarily overlapped and left British and French political and trading fortunes in the region interconnected. During the Seven Years’ War, Britain occupied the French comptoir of Saint-Louis (on the mouth of the Senegal River) and the sea island of Gorée, bringing the whole Senegal coast under British control. This chapter examines this late-eighteenth-century contest in the context of the changing political economy of the region, as the slave trade waned (the transatlantic slave trade was in decline in Senegambia by the 1770s) and as both powers turned to gum, which appeared to have important uses in European industry.