Cast in Stone

Media metadata | Métadonnées multimédias

Alfred Lewis Jones

has biography | a une biographie

Welsh colonial businessman and ship-owner in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

During his life, Jones achieved a dominant position in the colonial shipping trade, as well as accruing many other landholdings and business investments. His career started, aged twelve, as an apprentice in the African Steamship Company in Liverpool in 1857. Jones had become a manager of the company in 1871 and began to expand his colonial investments in West Africa, particularly through his work with Elder, Dempster & Co.. By the 1890s, Jones had secured a vast business portfolio in the region, including shipping, landholdings, banking, and mining. He founded the Bank of British West Africa and the Liverpool Institute of Tropical Medicine in this period. Jones also opened up new commercial connections between West Africa and the Caribbean, serving as the inaugural President of the British Cotton Growing Association from 1902.

Jones' colonial wealth was achieved through considerable violence, cruelty, and labour exploitation in Africa, as his close relationship to King Leopold II exemplifies. In 1891, for instance, Jones sponsored May French Sheldon to take a company trip to the Congo in order to downplay the extensive human rights abuses that were taking place in the colony.

was born | est né

24 February 1845

died in | est mort par

13 December 1909

has nationality | a la nationalité

Wales

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

has type | est de type

depicted

is referred to by | est référencé par

Wikipedia

Stephen Small, 'Reparations for Liverpool Imperialism and West Africa' (2022)

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Mariner Books, 1998)