In 1807, Britain and the United States passed legislation limiting and ultimately prohibiting the transoceanic slave trade. As world powers negotiated anti-slave-trade treaties thereafter, British, Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian, French, and US authorities seized ships suspected of illegal slave trading, raided slave barracoons, and detained newly landed slaves. The judicial processes in a network of the world's first international courts of humanitarian justice not only resulted in the "liberation" of nearly two hundred thousand people but also generated an extensive archive of documents. Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896 makes use of these records to illuminate the fates of former slaves, many of whom were released from bondage only to be conscripted into extended periods of indentured servitude.
Essays in this collection explore a range of topics related to those often referred to as "Liberated Africans"-a designation that, the authors show, should be met with skepticism. Contributors share an emphasis on the human consequences for Africans of the abolitionist legislation. The collection is deeply comparative, looking at conditions in British colonies such as Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and the Cape Colony as well as slave-plantation economies such as Brazil, Cuba, and Mauritius. A groundbreaking intervention in the study of slavery, abolition, and emancipation, this volume will be welcomed by scholars, students, and all who care about the global legacy of slavery.
Author(s): Richard Anderson, Henry B. Lovejoy
Series: Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 482
City: Rochester
Frontcover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “Liberated Africans” and Early International
Courts of Humanitarian Effort
Part One. Origins of Liberated Africans
1 Precedents: The “Captured Negroes” of Tortola, 1807–22
2 The Impact of Liberated African “Disposal” Policies in
Early Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone
3 Visualizing Abolition: Mapping the Suppression of the
African Slave Trade, 1810s–90s
Part Two. Sierra Leone
4 Liberated African “Children” in Sierra Leone: Colonial
Classifications of “Child” and “Childhood,” 1808–19
5 New Insights on Liberated Africans: The 1831
Freetown Census
6 Ali Eisami’s Enslavement in Jihad and Emancipation as a
Liberated African
Part Three. Caribbean
7 The Misfortune of Liberated Africans in Colonial Cuba,
1824–76
8 Household Labor and Sexual Coercion: Reconstructing
Women’s Experience of African Recaptive Settlement
9 Gavino of the Lucumi Nation: David Turnbull and the
Liberated Africans of Havana
Part Four. Lusophone Atlantic
10 British Antislavery Diplomacy and Liberated African
Rights as an International Issue
11 Producing “Liberated” Africans in Mid-nineteenth
Century Angola
12 The Paquete de Benguela: Illegal Slave Trade and the
Liberated Africans in Rio de Janeiro
Part Five. Liberated Africans in Global Perspective
13 Liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean World
14 Liberated Africans at the Cape: Some Reconsiderations
15 Liberated African Settlers on St. Helena
16 “Fugitive Liberated Congoes”: Recaptive Youth and the
Rejection of Liberian Apprenticeships, 1858–61
Part Six. Resettlements
17 “Perpetual Expatriation”: Forced Migration and Liberated
African Apprenticeship in the Gambia
18 “Promoting the Industry of Liberated Africans” in
British Honduras, 1824–41
19 Diaspora Consciousness, Historical Memory, and Culture
in Liberated African Villages in Grenada, 1850s–2014
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
