Abolitionism and the Back-to-Africa Movement in Britain: The Sierra Leone Experiment

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavlin Atanasov ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Penal Colonies ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Black Poor

The article focuses on the settlement of freed black slaves from England and Nova Scotia in Sierra Leone. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, plans were made for the “repatriation” of impoverished migrants of African descent to their “ancestral” land. Such plans were contextually defined by the abolitionist movement in Britain. Abolitionism gained exceptional momentum in the country that played a leading part in the transatlantic slave trade at that time. The movement aimed to end both the slave trade and slavery. The article investigates the activities of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor and especially the role of the prominent British philanthropist and abolitionist Granville Sharp (1735–1813), who made significant efforts to bring the “repatriation” plans to fruition. I argue that the Sierra Leone project was an ambivalent experiment, which should be interpreted in the light of both humanitarian compassion and imperial interests: if, at first, it was premised upon idealism and religious fervour, the desire to set foot in west Africa and to set up a colony there subsequently prevailed. For some Britons, sending impoverished free blacks to distant shores was also an opportunity to expel them from their own “white” society. In this sense, the “repatriation” of Africans was most likely to occur in the form of deportation, a form that suggests the restrictive regime of penal colonies, such as Australia.

Abolitionism and the Back-to-Africa Movement in Britain: The Sierra Leone Experiment

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavlin Atanasov ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Penal Colonies ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Black Poor

The article focuses on the settlement of freed black slaves from England and Nova Scotia in Sierra Leone. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, plans were made for the “repatriation” of impoverished migrants of African descent to their “ancestral” land. Such plans were contextually defined by the abolitionist movement in Britain. Abolitionism gained exceptional momentum in the country that played a leading part in the transatlantic slave trade at that time. The movement aimed to end both the slave trade and slavery. The article investigates the activities of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor and especially the role of the prominent British philanthropist and abolitionist Granville Sharp (1735–1813), who made significant efforts to bring the “repatriation” plans to fruition. I argue that the Sierra Leone project was an ambivalent experiment, which should be interpreted in the light of both humanitarian compassion and imperial interests: if, at first, it was premised upon idealism and religious fervour, the desire to set foot in west Africa and to set up a colony there subsequently prevailed. For some Britons, sending impoverished free blacks to distant shores was also an opportunity to expel them from their own “white” society. In this sense, the “repatriation” of Africans was most likely to occur in the form of deportation, a form that suggests the restrictive regime of penal colonies, such as Australia.

Africa

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Elbourne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
Coastal Regions ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Educational Networks ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Relationship

Anglicanism had a limited institutional presence in Africa in the long eighteenth century, not least because the British were largely confined to slave forts before the acquisition of the Cape Colony and Sierra Leone at the end of the period. The relationship between Anglicanism and certain regions of Africa was shaped from the outset by slavery and the slave trade. This chapter focuses on the coastal regions of West Africa and to a more limited extent southern Africa, and includes discussion of African–British educational networks, the growing British abolitionist movement, and the foundation of Sierra Leone as an abolitionist and putatively Anglican colony beset by contradictions. Where Anglicanism did spread it was done by Africans, foreshadowing later developments, ironically often through networks created by colonialism and the slave trade.

African Slavery and Spanish Empire

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Demographic Situation ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Racial Slavery

This article traces a philosophical shift that opened the door to a new departure in eighteenth-century Spanish empire: a newly emerging sense that the slave trade and African slavery were essential to the wealth of nations. Contextualizing this ideological reconfiguration within mid-eighteenth century debates, this article draws upon the works of political economists and royal councilors in Madrid and puts them in conversation with the words and actions of individuals in and from Cuba, including people of African descent themselves. Because of the central place of the island in eighteenth-century imperial rivalry and reform, as well as its particular demographic situation, Cuba served as a catalyst for these debates about the place of African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in Spanish empire. Ultimately, between the mid-eighteenth century and the turn of the nineteenth, this new mode of thought would lead to dramatic transformations in the institution of racial slavery and Spanish imperial political economy.

Antislavery on a Slave Coast

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Early History ◽  
Joint Stock Company ◽  
Stock Company ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Before the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, colonial Sierra Leone was an experiment in free trade and free labour, founded by the Sierra Leone Company, a joint-stock company led by antislavery activists, and settled by African American Loyalists from Nova Scotia. This chapter explores the early history of the colony, and shows how antislavery was undermined by the routines of the transatlantic slave trade. Meanwhile, African American settlers were marginalised, and the arrival of 500 Jamaican Maroons in 1800 helped to cement the relationship between the leaders of the antislavery movement and the British armed forces.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Behrendt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This article reviews scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. The foundations of a slave trade historiography date to the late eighteenth-century abolition movements in North America, Britain, and France. Before then, occasional voices sounded in protest. The Dominican friar Tomás de Mercado, for example, published in 1569 an anti-slave trade tract based on his observations of slave sales in Seville and of the institution of slavery in Mexico. From 1698 to 1714, 198 pamphlets concerning the Royal African Company's monopoly were published in England. With the founding of the world's first antislavery crusade, antislavery advocates came to predominate among the researchers who were seeking information on the slave trade. Abolitionist energies coalesced in 1787–9 in London with the formation of anti-slave trade committees and the subsequent British parliamentary inquiries. In this three-year period at least twenty-five British, American, and French authors wrote about the slave trade, a total that would not be reached again until the 1970s, when academics organized the first major conferences on Atlantic slaving.

‘Freeman stand, or freeman die’: liberty and slavery

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-216
Author(s):  
Alison Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Thomas Gray ◽  
True State ◽  
Working People ◽  
The Face ◽  
English Nationalism

The words ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ feature in forty-three poems in this collection, indicative of the centrality of this theme to the radical discourse of the day. In an era of almost unprecedented repression and the curtailment of rights, working people wished to rid themselves of their chains and reclaim their lost liberties, as a way of asserting English nationalism in the face of a ‘foreign’ monarchy. The twelve poems and songs in this section celebrate both the forthcoming return of liberty, presented as a goddess, and Henry Hunt as liberty’s human representative. The restoration of liberty as an end to slavery is a common trope within English radical discourse and poems often depict the radical patriot endeavouring to rescue his country from an imposed and unnatural tyranny and return it to its true state of liberty; however, this trope predates the era of revolution when such rhetoric was common currency and this section explores the prevalence of the theme of liberty in the mid-eighteenth century and the subsequent influence of William Collins and Thomas Gray on the poems in this collection. The introduction also seeks to explain the lack of references to the transatlantic slave trade in these poems at a time when the issue of rights was at the fore. It includes poems written by Samuel Bamford and the Spencean Robert Wedderburn.

Sierra Leone

2019 ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
João José Reis ◽  
Flávio dos Santos Gomes ◽  
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho ◽  
H. Sabrina Gledhill
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Western Coast ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
British Colony ◽  
History Of

After being captured by the Royal Navy brig Water Witch, the Ermelinda is taken to Sierra Leone, a British colony, the history of which is narrated from its foundation by philanthroposts, including the leading abolitionist Granville Sharp, in the late eighteenth century up until Rufino landed there in December 1841. British cruisers deposited scores of liberated Africans there40,000 in the 1830s alone. As a result, Sierra Leone’s population included people of different faiths and ethnicities from all over the western coast of Africa and Mozambique. Anti–slave trade Mixed Commissions were installed in Freetown, where the trial of the Ermelinda was carried out for two months.

scholarly journals Reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and historical enslavement: Linking past atrocities with contemporary victim populations

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 247-269
Author(s):  
Luke Moffett ◽  
Katarina Schwarz
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Transitional Societies ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Past

The debate around reparations for the transatlantic slave trade has been discussed for centuries with no end in sight. This article does not intend to cover the historical or political aspects of this debate, but instead to shed more light on the legal options with regards to reparations. In particular this article examines the role of politically negotiated reparations in transitional societies and the limits of avenues of redress in international law. Key to such discussions is the identification of eligible victims and appropriate measures of redress from responsible actors. With the so-called ‘transatlantic slave trade’ the passage of time has strained legal principles of causation to identify those victimised by atrocities of the past. Instead this article argues that reparations beyond the international law construct can be politically negotiated to at least acknowledge the past and offer some symbolic measures of redress to victimised populations of transatlantic enslavement.

Slavery in Africa

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ty M. Reese
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Political System ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Ability To Work ◽  
Common System ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Client System

Slavery is viewed as an ancient and universal institution and thus it can be found in a diversity of forms throughout Africa. During the period of the Atlantic world, slavery served multiple roles within Africa and provided a foundation for the transatlantic slave trade in that Europeans found slaves for sale within Africa. In many parts of Africa, land was held in common and therefore people’s ability to work the land, and their position within their society, related to the number of people whom they controlled. This patron-client system meant that patrons were always looking for more clients, both free and unfree, as a way to increase their power. The nature of this agricultural and political system made slavery and pawnship (debt peonage) a common system in Africa, yet it was a system that is hard to generalize about and one that possessed great differences from the African slavery that developed in the Americas. While the role of African slavery in the Americas has been more thoroughly studied, and is better known, than slavery in Africa, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and then its gradual abolition in the 19th century, had important consequences for slavery within Africa.

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