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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 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.

Adrian Jarvis’ contribution looks at the role of Alfred Jones (about whom Peter Davies has written extensively) in the development of the port system on the Mersey. Jarvis explores how Jones placed power before profit in his impressive rise to riches, and how he sought control over every aspects of the trades in which he engaged, not always by very scrupulous methods.

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.

Civil rights returned to dominate the nation's domestic agenda with Brown v. Board of Education. Although not directly involved in that case, the 1866 Act furnished part of the background for this dramatic expansion of constitutional prohibitions against racial discrimination. In particular, the act offers an alternative basis for the decision in the companion case to Brown, Bolling v. Sharpe. That opinion applied to the federal government under the Fifth Amendment the same principles against racial discrimination applicable to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment. This result, although politically compelled, involved awkward reasoning that read the later amendment back into the earlier one, a step that can more easily be accommodated by the broad coverage of the 1866 Act. The scope of that coverage figured in another decision at the end of the Civil Rights Era, Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., which interpreted the act to prohibit private discrimination. This result also had political support, in the form of modern civil rights legislation enacted under the Commerce Clause, but it served to solidify prohibitions against racial discrimination without regard to the intricacies of the state action doctrine. In doing so, it also revived the 1866 Act as a source of modern civil rights claims, chiefly in the field of employment discrimination law.