Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Between 1808 and 1867, the British navy seized nearly two thousand slave ships, "re-capturing" almost two hundred thousand enslaved people, who were then placed as liberated Africans across an "archipelago" of resettlement sites, including Sierra Leone, Cape Colony, the West Indies, Brazil, Cuba, and beyond. Maeve Ryan explores the set of imperial experiments and discourses that took shape as a result of this unintended consequence of abolition policy, and their importance to the evolution of a British antislavery "world system." This is a study of how the British imperial state and its treaty partners sought to administer and control the labor of liberated Africans, and of the dual discourses of compassion and control that evolved around a people expected to repay the debt of their salvation. Ryan demonstrates the role liberated Africans played in the evolution of humanitarian governance, and the impact of interventionist experiments on the lives of these people.
Synopsis
How the suppression of the slave trade and the "disposal" of liberated Africans shaped the emergence of modern humanitarianism Between 1808 and 1867, the British navy seized nearly two thousand slave ships, "re-capturing" almost two hundred thousand enslaved people, who were then placed as liberated Africans across an "archipelago" of resettlement sites, including Sierra Leone, Cape Colony, the West Indies, Brazil, Cuba, and beyond. Maeve Ryan explores the set of imperial experiments and discourses that took shape as a result of this unintended consequence of abolition policy, and their importance to the evolution of a British antislavery "world system." This is a study of how the British imperial state and its treaty partners sought to administer and control the labor of liberated Africans, and of the dual discourses of compassion and control that evolved around a people expected to repay the debt of their salvation. Ryan demonstrates the role liberated Africans played in the evolution of humanitarian governance, and the impact of interventionist experiments on the lives of these people.