The Paradox of Protection

The Paradox of Protection: The Making of Indirect Rule in Southern Sierra Leone, 1850–1915 charts the history of protection to tell a new story about indirect rule in West Africa. Protection emerged as one of the central concepts through which Africans and Britons negotiated over law and economy in decades spanning informal and formal rule. Hogg shows how British protection schemes, an assemblage of written and unwritten legal strategies to safeguard British subjects and trade routes, created an unexpected legacy of insecurity by limiting and criminalizing traditional security measures. Tracing the history of the politics of protection reveals how African leaders who sought British alliances in their own long-standing disputes became increasingly vulnerable to physical and juridical violence. In the Protectorate, new forums like chieftaincy elections and criminal courts—common features of indirect rule—became spaces for Africans to assert claims to land and construct legitimacy. This book reveals how long-standing negotiations over protection shaped an unstable framework of colonial law and rule well into the twentieth century.