A Senegambian King in an Englishman’s Bed: The King of Saloum, Francis Moore, and the Making of Early Modern Sovereignty

Abstract

This article explores the interactions between the English Royal African Company agent Francis Moore and the king of Saloum, which Moore described in Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738). The king, in his efforts to maintain royal control over the slave trade, twice occupied the English company’s upriver warehouse, taking possession of it and its goods for his own use. I argue that situating such extant travel accounts within the political circumstances of the encounters that generated them—the politics at the intersection—as well as the politics shaping their reception—the politics of the intersection—illuminates the cross-cultural production of ideas about and practices of sovereignty in western Europe and Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. Paying special attention to how Moore’s account contributed to the coalescence of the figure of the African despot in European political discourse, the essay roots this trope in European experiences of subjection in the centralized Wolof/Serer military kingdom of Saloum.