New Approaches to the Founding of the Sierra Leone Colony, 1786–1808

Abstract

New Approaches to the Founding of the Sierra Leone Colony, 1786–1808 Isaac Land and Andrew M. Schocket This special issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History consists of a forum of innovative ways to consider and reappraise the founding of Britain’s Sierra Leone colony. It originated with a conversation among the two of us and Pamela Scully – all having research interests touching on Sierra Leone in that period – noting that the recent historical inquiry into the origins of this colony had begun to reach an important critical mass. Having long been dominated by a few seminal works, it has begun to attract interest from a number of scholars, both young and established, from around the globe.1 Accordingly, we set out to collect new, exemplary pieces that, taken together, present a variety of innovative theoretical, methodological, and topical approaches to Sierra Leone. We expect that these articles will be of great interest to those invested in the history of that particular time and place. But we also believe that the wider readership of this journal will find that the following articles raise provocative questions, both in method and in interpretation, that hold significant implications for the study of colonialism in its broadest historical context. After all, the establishment of the first British settlement colony in Africa illuminates numerous themes recurring often in our studies of empires before and after: early plans reflecting a mix of colonizing experience and untested metropolitan assumptions; colonization as a physical, cultural, economic, racialized and gendered project; complex relations not only between colonizers and colonized but also the formation of new political, diplomatic, and economic patterns beyond the colony’s borders; and the ambiguous status and culture of settlers as colonizers and clients, to name a few. The early years of the Sierra Leone colony represent an ideal site to investigate those motifs and many others. Nestled on the west African coast just south of the Guinea area and named for the leonine mountains visible from the shoreline, in the eighteenth century it was home to more than a dozen ethnic groupings, most notably the Temne, Mende, and Sherbro near the coast and the Limba inland. By then they were quite familiar with Europeans, having traded slaves and palm oil to them and been the subject of Christian missionary efforts for nearly two hundred years. Meanwhile, in the mid-1780s, black loyalist refugees from the American Revolution had gravitated to two general areas, London and Nova Scotia. In London, a group of white philanthropists decided to kill two birds with one stone by resettling the black poor to the coast of Africa, thereby not only helping the blacks return to their ancestral homeland but also striking a blow against the slave trade. Their first attempt in 1787 was an economic and demographic failure. However, four years later, some of the same men tried again, this time establishing a corporation – the Sierra Leone Company -- and finding that an astonishing 1,200 Nova Scotian black loyalists were eager to emigrate at company expense. These settlers landed in what the colony labeled “Freetown” in 1792, and in the following years struggled both with Company officials and with an unfamiliar land and climate, as most of them had been born in America. Local groups, meanwhile, now negotiated between the slave traders still present and the new colonial presence. Although the colony survived, reaching a population of about 2,000 by 1807, it continued to flounder financially, and in 1808 was re-established as a British protectorate under the direct supervision of the British crown. Soon after, the British began resettling Africans there that the Royal Navy “recaptured” from the slave ships of other nations. Click for larger view View full resolution “Plan of Sierra Leone,” drawn by James Phillips and published by the Sierra Leone Company in London in 1794. Map reproduced with the permission of the Afriterra Foundation. www.afriterra.org The articles in this issue fall roughly between the drafting of the first British plans for colonizing the area and the arrival of the colony’s first crown-appointed governor, thus following the trajectory from initial beginnings to Sierra Leone’s official recognition as...