The Atlas of Africanía

Geographical accounts written in the mid to late eighteenth century, for example, Michael Adanson’s A Voyage to Senegal, the Isle of Gorée and the River Gambia (1759), established in Britain the idea of a primitivist and idyllic Africa. By offering comparative analyses of coastal settlements and the African interior, these narratives contributed to the prevailing antislavery debates the theory that the farther away from the coastline, where the slave trade was centered, the more civilized African culture became. Spatialization of the Atlantic slavery controversy in this manner produced imaginative geographies that represented West Africa as the noble and potentially lucrative counterpoint to the degraded practices and looming impoverishment of the West Indian colonies.2

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