In founding Liberia and Sierra Leone, anti-slavery colonizationists in Britain and America built on the dreams and ambitions of centuries of agricultural planning for Africa. They hoped to establish self-sufficient colonies that would contribute to the production of tropical goods for import into the metropole (‘legitimate commerce’), bases from which to operate against the slave trade, and refuges for freed slaves. From the start, however, the many advocates of legitimate commerce in both countries were disappointed by the colonists' apparent lack of enthusiasm for plantation agriculture and the failure of their mission in spreading agriculture to the indigenous Africans. Agriculture was a continual theme in writing by anti-slavery activists interested in these colonies, with new plans for its implementation regularly being formed — from the settlement of new American colonies in Liberia to the 1841 Niger Expedition's model farm. It was also a regular target of both pro-slavery forces and immediate abolitionists, who used reports of the failure of agriculture to lambast the projects. The contested perceptions of West Africa's settler agriculture were carried into the secondary literature also. Most historians of the settler colonies of Freetown and Liberia note that they ‘sought wealth through commerce’ rather than plantation-style farming. However, in both anti-slavery literature and subsequent historiography, the term ‘agriculture’ hides the multiplicity of expectations the settlers were expected to meet, from combating the slave trade, to establishing self-sufficient utopian settler communities, to spreading the message of civilisation through commerce, to providing a new free-labour arena for plantation agriculture following the abolition of slavery in the West Indies.