(this page–this page), proposed that fences be placed
around the mining areas and the monopoly rights auctioned
off. They wanted an Australian version of the Sierra Leone
Selection Trust. Yet many in Australia wanted free access
to the gold mining areas. The inclusive model won, and
instead of setting up a monopoly, Australian authorities
allowed anyone who paid an annual mining license fee to
search and dig for gold. Soon the diggers, as these
adventurers came to be known, were a powerful force in
Australian politics, particularly in Victoria. They played an
important role in pushing forward the agenda of universal
suffrage and the secret ballot.
We have already seen two pernicious effects of
European expansion and colonial rule in Africa: the
introduction of the transatlantic slave trade, which
encouraged the development of African political and
economic institutions in an extractive direction, and the use
of colonial legislation and institutions to eliminate the
development of African commercial agriculture that might
have competed with Europeans. Slavery was certainly a
force in Sierra Leone. At the time of colonization there was
no strong centralized state in the interior, just many small,
mutually antagonistic kingdoms continually raiding one
another and capturing one another’s men and women.
Slavery was endemic, with possibly 50 percent of the
population working as slaves. The disease environment
meant that large-scale white settlement was not possible in
Sierra Leone, as it was in South Africa. Hence there were
no whites competing with the Africans. Moreover, the lack
of a mining economy on the scale of Johannesburg meant
that, in addition to the lack of demand for African labor from
white farms, there was no incentive to create the extractive
labor market institutions so characteristic of Apartheid
South Africa.
But other mechanisms were also in play. Sierra Leone’s
cocoa and coffee farmers did not compete with whites,
though their incomes were still expropriated via a
government monopoly, the marketing board. Sierra Leone
also suffered from indirect rule. In many parts of Africa
where the British authorities wished to use indirect rule,
they found peoples who did not have a system of
centralized authority who could be taken over. For example,