Further Light on Archibald Dalzel

African scholars devoted a fair amount of attention to Archibald Dalzel during the years 1965-1967. Interest centered on his History of Dahomy and new biographical materials. Trained as a surgeon, Dalzel served as an officer of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa in 1763-1770 and again in 1791-1802, attempted a career as a slave merchant, and wrote The History of Dahomy in 1793. Observing that Information concerning Dalzel's life scarce, Loren K. Waldman asserted that Dalzel's book, relied on by a number of writers, is a Waldman pointed to Dalzel's pro-slave trade activities in 1788, references to him in the controversy over abolition in 1789-1791, and Dalzel's description of Dahomeans as people who went to war by their nature and not a result of the slave trade. Waldman's coverage of Dalzel's pro-slave trade activities less than complete, and he erroneously dates Dalzel's governorship of Cape Coast Castle as from 1785-1790.1 In an article published in the same journal the following year, I.A. Akinjogbin exploited Dalzel's correspondence mainly with his younger brother, which in the Edinburgh University Library. With these letters he filled in a good many biographical details, especially bringing to light some aspects of Dalzel's career as a slave trader. Even so, details were sometimes sparse and there remained great gaps in Dalzel's career. For the next nine years after 1783, wrote Akinjogbin, it not known what was happening to Dalzel or what he was doing for his livelihood. Similarly, Dalzel's activities in the last phase of his life, which was the period between his resignation in 1802 and his death (which probably occurred at an advanced age around 1811), are completely obscure.2 J.D. Fage brought out a new printing of The History of Dahomy the next year. Noting that almost the whole of Dalzel's active career of nearly forty years, from 1763 to 1802, was bound up with Britain's trade in African slaves, Fage largely followed Akinjogbin in writing a biographical account in his introduction to the new printing and in seeing the book as a polemic. At the same time he considered the questions of veracity and usefulness of the book. The

Genealogy · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History

• Dahomey and the Slave Trade

  Open Access•Robin Law•The Journal of African History•1986

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