Conceptualizing ‘Liberated Africans’ and Slave Trade Abolition: Government Schemes to Indenture Enslaved People Captured from Slavery, 1800–1920

Abstract

Abstract A new survey of ‘Liberated Africans’ exposes how global calculations of involuntary African indentured labour after 1800 have been significantly underestimated. This analysis of the suppression of the slave trade draws upon a publicly accessible database and digital archive at LiberatedAfricans.org. A quantitative, spatial and chronological visualization of abolition in action, the website memorializes lived experiences of the victims of abolition on micro and macro levels. Results show that there were more than 700,000 individuals captured from the slave trade, ‘liberated’, and forced into periods of indenture according to anti-slave-trade law. This article consolidates the historiography to challenge dominant narratives that British-led efforts were the most voluminous, instead revealing a more complex and multifaceted global phenomenon involving the mass registration of upwards of 200,000 people by name. Digital humanities methodologies facilitate tracking migratory patterns of ‘Liberated Africans’ in diaspora, that is from African regions of departure through documented capture locations in slave trade blockades, judicial processes resulting in ‘liberation’, and settlements of indenture often involving secondary migrations. With the participation of at least eighteen different nations, key findings determine that Portugal and France contributed to upwards of 370,000 ‘Liberated Africans’, surpassing Britain which supplied about a third of global estimates.