Sierra Leone in the Atlantic World: concepts, contours, and exchange

2020 ◽  
pp. 24-44
Author(s):  
Christopher R. DeCorse
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Atlantic World

Experiments in Colonial Citizenship in Sierra Leone and Liberia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronwen Everill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Competing Models ◽  
Colonial Governance

Looking at African resettlement in Sierra Leone and Liberia within the context of the Atlantic world and movements like that in Haiti to define citizenship and subjecthood, Everill argues that these resettlement projects spawned numerous innovations in self-representation and constitutionalism. She maintains that, experimenting with ideas of colonial citizenship and representation, empires sought to retain and expand their influence in the wake of the American, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions for indepedence. Polities that did not consider themselves empires, however, like the United States, had to navigate ideas of citizenship, representation, and independence as they expanded beyond their original borders. As a result, she argues, the structures of colonial governance in early Sierra Leone and Liberia reflected the emergence of two competing models of constitutional colonial development.

Sierra Leone in the Atlantic World: concepts, contours, and exchange

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher R. DeCorse
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Atlantic World

scholarly journals The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839–1870

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 836-867
Author(s):  
Jake Subryan Richards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Coercive Intervention

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.

Sierra Leone and the Grand Duke of Tuscany

1993 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 61-69
Author(s):  
P. E. H. Hair ◽  
Jonathan D. Davies
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Initial Momentum ◽  
Permanent Settlement ◽  
Marine Disaster ◽  
Jesuit Missionary ◽  
Made In

In 1606 Philip II of Portugal (and III of Spain) granted to a faithful court official, the Portuguese nobleman Pedro Álvares Pereira, the captaincy of Sierra Leone in Guinea, subject to his establishing an effective settlement there. This was on the lines of previous royal grants of other areas of the Atlantic world—the fifteenth-century grants of the Portuguese Atlantic islands, the grants of segments of the coast of Brazil in the 1530s, and of the coast of Angola in the 1570s. These earlier grants had led to the extension of Portuguese domain, that is, conquista, confirmed in the earlier instances by settlement but the grant made to Pedro Álvares Pereira led to no permanent settlement at Sierra Leone and not even to Portuguese overrule of the African peoples of the district. A first attempt to carry out the terms of the grant, made in 1606 through the agency of a Jesuit missionary, Fr. Baltasar Barreira, lost its initial momentum because of a sudden decline in the fortunes of Pedro Álvares Pereira. In 1608 he fell out of favor at the court, accused of corruption and malpractice—a not uncommon happening in the jealously competitive arena of the Madrid court—and hence was unable to send ships and supplies to Sierra Leone to substantiate his grant. Eventually he returned to favour and between 1612 and 1616 tried again, but for reasons which are not entirely clear but apparently included the loss of agents in a marine disaster, he gave up the struggle and in 1621, just before he died, he relinquished the grant.

scholarly journals West Africa in the British Atlantic: Trade, Violence, and Empire in the 1640s

Itinerario ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-327
Author(s):  
Richard J. Blakemore
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Trading Partners ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Legal Frameworks ◽  
Atlantic Empire

The importance of Africa and African agency in the formation of the Atlantic world is now widely acknowledged by historians, but Africa has drawn less attention than other regions in analyses of the British Atlantic. Drawing upon the nascent methodology of global microhistory, this article contributes to a scholarly rebalancing by examining two maritime lawsuits from the 1640s concerning British voyages to Senegambia and Sierra Leone, both of which resulted in conflict between British seafarers and with their African trading partners. A close study of the documents surviving from these lawsuits provides an unusually detailed glimpse of these particular moments of contact and violence across cultures. More fundamentally, such an approach illuminates the ocean-spanning networks within which these ventures took place, and reveals the ways in which British traders and sailors perceived trade in Africa within their own legal frameworks. This article argues that by the middle of the seventeenth century, as merchants and politicians in Britain began to imagine an Atlantic empire, trade in West Africa was an important part of their vision of the Atlantic world.

The Roots of the African Diaspora: Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Names in the Liberated African Registers of Sierra Leone and Havana

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 365-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Ugo Nwokeji ◽  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
First Century ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Methodological Considerations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

Europe and the Americas have long dominated studies of transatlantic exchanges and much more is known about European participation in the Atlantic world than of its African counterpart. Current knowledge of how those parts of Africa located a few miles away from the African littoral contributed to the early modern Atlantic World is particularly sparse. This is despite the fact that the slave trade was the largest branch of transatlantic migration between Columbian contact and 1870, and that it is becoming apparent that Africans and indigenous Americans helped shape the new political and economic power structures, as well as the post-Columbian worlds of culture and labor.Assessments of the impact of any group on the global stage must begin with the nature of the group itself, and thus efforts to raise the African profile in Atlantic scholarship and to focus on the agency of Africans must quickly face the contentious issue of ethnicity. From the broadest perspective, it is odd that the way the ancestors of the Atlantic World defined themselves should have become so much more contentious among Africanists and Afro-Americanists than among those scholars who study Europe and Europeans overseas. At the outset of the repeopling of the Americas, the European state existed in nascent form in only Spain, Britain, and France. The predominance of the nation-state in the way the world is organized in the twenty-first century—rather than its status in 1492—has perhaps led scholars to stress the contrasts between Africa and Europe on issues of early modern nationhood, and, more generally, human identity.

Abolition in Sierra Leone

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Peter Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone
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