When the British landed, the battle was all but over and the city had been evacuated. Lagos belonged to the British; they were to stay for the next hundred and nine years. The bombardment of the city was, like much of British policy on the slave coasts of Africa, motivated by the twin objectives of suppressing the slave trade and opening up the interior of Africa to ‘legitimate trade’, that would be of benefit and advantage to Britain, as the anti-slave-trade mission and colonial expansion increasingly dovetailed.
