Mollien's Travels in the Interior of Africa were much cited by nineteenth-century abolitionists, including Thomas Fowell Buxton and Victor Schoelcher, influenced by his reports that Africans, especially those living inland, were more "civilised" than was generally believed in Europe, that contact with slave-dealing Europeans had had an enormously negative impact in the coastal areas, and that the European abolition of the slave trade had failed so far to end the enslavement of Africans. He suggests that the transaharan trade had effectively replaced the transatlantic one. Mollien first travelled to Senegal in 1816, on board the shipwrecked Méduse, which was sent to restore French control of the colony after the Napoleonic wars. He began his year-long expedition into the interior, detailed in this book, in January 1818.