Abolition in Sierra Leone: Re-Building Lives and Identities in Nineteenth-Century West Africa

Tracing the lives and experiences of 100,000 Africans who landed in Sierra Leone having been taken off slave vessels by the British Navy following Britain's abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, this study focuses on how people, forcibly removed from their homelands, packed on to slave ships, and settled in Sierra Leone were able to rebuild new lives, communities, and collective identities in an early British colony in West Africa. Their experience illuminates both African and African diaspora history by tracing the evolution of communities forged in the context of forced migration and the missionary encounter in a prototypical post-slavery colonial society. A new approach to the major historical field of British anti-slavery, studied not as a history of legal victories (abolitionism) but of enforcement and lived experience (abolition), Richard Peter Anderson reveals the linkages between emancipation, colonization, and identity formation in the Black Atlantic.

Author: Richard Peter Anderson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 01/30/2020
Pages: 306
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781108473545

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2020

About the Author
Anderson, Richard Peter: - Richard Peter Anderson is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Exeter. He has published in journals including Slavery & Abolition, African Economic History, and History in Africa. He is co-editor of Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896 (forthcoming) with Henry Lovejoy.