Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896

Abstract

Nearly 50 years since Robert Conrad's pathbreaking article on the emancipados of Brazil—published in this journal (volume 53, issue 1)—the history of the Africans liberated from slave ships as the result of measures for suppressing the slave trade has taken a global turn. Yet the scholarship produced as part of this trend has tended to focus on the Anglophone Atlantic.This collection of essays on liberated Africans organized by Richard Anderson and Henry Lovejoy, two historians of Africa and the African diaspora, brings together for the first time studies covering groups settled in territories of the British, Spanish, and Portuguese empires as well as independent Brazil and Liberia. Treated as a special and somewhat extraneous group in national histories until the early 2000s, liberated Africans gained renewed attention after the bicentennial of the British abolition of the slave trade in 2007. Then a number of conferences on the circumstances surrounding and conflicts over abolition in various regions counteracted the excessive focus on British actors and events and highlighted the importance of considering the continuation and transformations of the slave trade after 1807. As the unexpected byproduct of the trade's suppression, recaptive Africans settled or resettled in Sierra Leone, Cape Colony, Saint Helena, the British Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Suriname, Martinique, Brazil, Angola, or Indian Ocean territories had similar statuses that stemmed from legislation or treaties aimed at abolishing the slave trade, which required them to serve for a certain period before attaining full emancipation. Liberated Africans stood out as the ideal category for comparing and evaluating the abolitionist campaign's effectiveness.The collection unites some longtime specialists on liberated Africans, many newcomers to the subfield, and others for whom the theme is marginal to their research agendas. The 19 chapters are divided into 6 sections organized according to a mix of chronological, geographical, and thematic approaches: “Origins of Liberated Africans,” “Sierra Leone,” “Caribbean,” “Lusophone Atlantic,” “Liberated Africans in Global Perspective,” and “Resettlements.” In the introduction, Anderson and Lovejoy set the collection within the context of the current debates on the British campaign for the slave trade's abolition and the growing importance of digital humanities initiatives for studying the African diaspora. To be sure, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (https://www.slavevoyages.org/), particularly its section on the liberated Africans' names, and the extensive digitization of the Sierra Leone archives have greatly affected recent scholarship. Anderson and Lovejoy estimate that 200,000 men, women, and children were “liberated” during the Atlantic and Indian Ocean phases of the suppression campaign, from 1808 to 1896; the coeditors present a fair overview of how many African recaptives were settled and resettled, where, and on what legal bases. In Latin America, the 11,000 africanos livres of Brazil and 27,000 emancipados of Cuba were included in the editors' count, but smaller groups in Puerto Rico and Martinique were not.British records have been fundamental for this collective endeavor, given the centrality and ubiquity of British institutions and bureaucracy, scattered all over the world, in the abolition campaign. The fairly regular series of documents allow for panoramic, comparative, and also microhistorical approaches. There is a mix of those in this volume, with essays covering the seizure and adjudication of ships in vice admiralty courts, mixed commission courts, or local legal venues as well as the disposal of the Africans for their compulsory terms of service, their daily lives amid slavery or postemancipation and also their resettlement, following intra- and interimperial policies. An integrated history of the slave trade's abolition is taking shape in which the people who were the campaign's object appear at the forefront, their collective experience becoming comparable and in turn giving a new perspective to policymaking and trends in labor, citizenship, migration, gender, international law, cultural transformations, and many other aspects of nineteenth-century history. The great reliance on British archives in this collection is both a strength and a weakness. The book includes chapters on recaptives in Liberia, Cuba, Brazil, Angola, and the Indian Ocean that draw from other documentary collections and reveal the imbalance: outside the British Empire, the continuation of the slave trade well into the 1850s and 1860s made for developments not sufficiently integrated into the narrative of abolition, which is still centered on the British Atlantic. The initiative to compile such a volume is to be praised; it is hoped that the debate will surpass the tunnel vision that frames it for now.This collection will be useful for scholars of the African diaspora, abolitionism, and global history, and a number of the essays will be of keen interest to those studying British diplomatic engagement in Latin America.