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This chapter explores the lives of Alexander Elder and John Dempster, two men whose work, power and influence changed the whole of Britain’s shipping and commercial relationship with West Africa. It discusses the pair’s impact on the British West African shipping trade in general and on Elder Dempster and Company in particular. The chapter details the rivalry between the African Steam Ship Company and the British and African Steam Navigation Company and presents the eventual negotiation and agreements made between the two. It concludes with the abrupt ending of the agency of the African Steam Ship Company.

This chapter follows the professional career of Alfred Lewis Jones to his position as senior partner of Elder Dempster and Company. It details Jones’ early career history, including the establishment of his firm, Alfred L. Jones and Company, and his junior partnership with Elder Dempster and Company. The chapter concludes with Jones’ decision to create a conference system to regulate the West African shipping trade, as a result of constant negotiations with rival opponents Woermann Line of Hamburg and the Royal Niger Company.

This chapter discusses Macgregor Laird’s involvement in the formation of the African Steam Ship Company and his role as its first managing director. It also discusses Laird’s personal and professional life as an early pioneer of West African Trade and shareholder in the African Inland Commercial Company. The chapter largely focuses on the usefulness of the River Niger as a ‘highway’ into Central Africa and accounts Laird’s own expedition up the river from October 1832 to August 1833, taken in order to prove that it was navigable for steam vessels. The chapter concludes with an account of the progress of the African Steam Ship Company in the period 1863 to 1868 and outlines the company’s failure to expand as a contributing factor to the intervention of the competing line of The British and African Steam Navigation Company.

This chapter provides an initial description of the three major groupings of West African merchants during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Niger Company, the Miller-Swanzy group and the African Association, and details their attempts to enter the shipping trade. The chapter focuses mainly on Alfred Lewis Jones’ decision to regulate the West African shipping trade via shipping conferences and explores his techniques and success rate in negotiating terms and agreements. It concludes with the eventual outcome of the conference in which Elder Dempster possessed an almost complete control of the British West African and West African carrying trade.

This chapter studies the expansion of the network of activities built up by Elder Dempster and explores the ways in which Alfred Lewis Jones extended his power and reach across the shipping, trade and banking markets in West Africa and the United Kingdom. It examines the steps taken by Jones in order to maintain a foothold in the West African shipping business and discusses the methods used when approached with limitations on his authority, in the form of rivals, government regulation and criticism from the press and public opinion. The chapter also features a commentary of the personal and professional relationship between Jones and John Holt, and old colleague and friend.