Steaming into the Unknown: Technological Change, the British Niger Expeditions, and Imperialism, 1832–1857

Abstract

This thesis repositions the nineteenth-century Niger Expeditions at the center of early British imperial development in West Africa. Rather than treating these ventures as isolated exploratory episodes, it argues that they functioned as technological and administrative experiments that helped lay the infrastructure for colonialism. Advances in tropical medicine, commercial expansion, diplomatic intervention with African rulers, and especially the development of riverine steamships enabled British influence on the Niger. Yet this process also depended on African labor, negotiation, and knowledge. Beginning with MacGregor Laird’s privately backed 1832 expedition and culminating in William Balfour Baikie’s public-private joint expeditions in the 1850s, the Niger became a laboratory for technopolitical adaptation. Drawing on Foreign Office correspondence, expedition narratives, medical reports, and missionary accounts, this study demonstrates that repeated experimentation on the Niger River expanded British commercial and political influence and helped consolidate imperial authority in the region later in the nineteenth century.