Abstract
AbstractWhat were the consequences of creating jurisdictions against the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Answering this question requires a comparative focus on the courts of mixed commission that adjudicated naval captures of slave ships, located at Sierra Leone (the foremost site of British abolition) and Brazil (the primary mid-century target). Court jurisdiction conflicted with sovereign jurisdiction regarding the presence of recaptives (“liberated Africans”), the risk of re-enslavement, and unlawful naval captures. To rescue the re-enslaved and compensate the loss of property, regulating anti-slave-trade jurisdiction involved coercive strategies alternating with negotiated value exchanges. Abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast.
Highlights
On 20 December 1844, three men, Tom Peters, William Mering, and John Sharp, swore before the Police Magistrate in Freetown, Sierra Leone, that they had recently been captured and sold into the transatlantic slave trade— for the second time in their lives
Learning from social theorists of law and economic anthropologists, we find that value exchange was analogous to law: it made sense only within all social relations, it was amenable to elite consolidation of power and legitimacy, and it created and consolidated worldviews, including of the life-cycle, gender relations, maritime trade, and conflict resolution
Other treaties between the Governor and chiefs farther from Sierra Leone committed the parties to abolishing the slave trade and treating the “lives and properties of liberated Africans [as] inviolate.”[88]. Unlike the Convention, the treaties did not specify how to return re-enslaved liberated Africans to the Colony
Summary
On 20 December 1844, three men, Tom Peters, William Mering, and John Sharp, swore before the Police Magistrate in Freetown, Sierra Leone, that they had recently been captured and sold into the transatlantic slave trade— for the second time in their lives. All three had previously lived in the British colony of Sierra Leone as “liberated Africans”— the Royal Navy had captured them from slave ships and registered them to serve apprenticeships on time-limited contracts, in accordance with anti-slave-trade treaties.[1] After apprenticeship, Peters and Mering had traveled outside the colony, southwards to Sherbro and the Gallinas River, to work in the extensive canoe trade of the Upper Guinea Coast. At an unspecified time, kidnappers and rulers had captured them: Peters was traded for ivory, Mering detained on
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