Abolition In Sierra Leone

A history of colonial Africa and of the African diaspora examining the experiences and identities of 'liberated' Africans in Sierra Leone.

A history of colonial Africa and of the African diaspora examining the experiences and identities of 'liberated' Africans in Sierra Leone.

Bronwen Everill offers a new perspective on African global history, applying a comparative approach to freed slave settlers in Sierra Leone and Liberia to understand their role in the anti-slavery colonization movements of Britain and America.

This volume places Sierra Leone within the larger landscape of the greater Atlantic world system. The essays demonstrate that the meaning of 'Sierra Leone' changed over time as Freetown became a frontier of the African diaspora. Christianity, migration, the abolition of slave trade and experiments in labour mobilisation through means other than slavery were haphazardly introduced in a context of missed opportunities for the nascent British colony.

"Interrogates the development of the world's first international courts of humanitarian justice and the subsequent "liberation" of nearly 200,000 Africans in the nineteenth century"--

Bronwen Everill offers a new perspective on African global history, applying a comparative approach to freed slave settlers in Sierra Leone and Liberia to understand their role in the anti-slavery colonization movements of Britain and America.

A history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone and how the British used its success to justify colonialism in Africa British anti-slavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. After the slave trade was abolished, anti-slavery activists in England profited, colonial officials in Freetown, Sierra Leone, relied on former slaves as soldiers and as cheap labor, and the British armed forces conscripted former slaves to fight in the West Indies and in West Africa. At once scholarly and compelling, this history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone draws on a wealth of archival material. Scanlan’s social and material study offers insight into how the success of British anti-slavery policies were used to justify colonialism in Africa. He reframes a moment considered to be a watershed in British public morality as rather the beginning of morally ambiguous, violent, and exploitative colonial history.