Search

This thesis explores how anti-slave-trade laws shaped the opportunities and limitations for enslaved people during the most intensive phase of abolition (c. 1839-1856) against the Brazilian slave trade, the largest in the Atlantic world. It focuses on case studies from Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Brazil, which were connected by the legal regime against the slave routes from South East Africa and West Central Africa to Brazil. Legal agents implemented bilateral treaty and parliamentary laws to reclassify enslaved captives as ‘liberated Africans’ through sanctioning the naval capture of slave ships, court adjudications of these captures, and the apprenticeship of the slaves. At the end of apprenticeship, the polity in which liberated Africans had served the apprenticeship generally had jurisdiction to determine their post-apprenticeship legal status. Historians have made two major claims regarding liberated Africans. Some scholars have argued that treaty and local laws attributed legal rights to liberated Africans. Others have argued that vested interests used apprenticeship to subject liberated Africans to de facto re-enslavement. However, historians have not addressed the fundamental ambiguities that agents of law (judges, naval officers, diplomats) and the enslaved faced in interpreting, implementing, and responding to anti-slave-trade laws. The central argument of the thesis is that continual interactions between agents of law and the slaves shaped the legal status of liberated Africans in different contexts. The first chapter argues that naval capture produced conditions similar to the Middle Passage, generating significant uncertainty for the slaves regarding how the naval crew would treat them. The second and third chapters focus on court adjudication, demonstrating that anti-slave-trade courts shaped norms for slaves’ testimony and interpolity relations on the Brazilian and the Upper Guinea coasts. The fourth chapter argues that state officials and hirers envisioned the apprenticeship of liberated Africans as producing ‘free labourers’ through wage incentives and punishments. However, liberated Africans did not subscribe to a worldview which gave primacy to wages and instead prioritized independent economic activity. The fifth and final chapter uses new archival material from magistrate records and the Ministério da Justiça in Rio to uncover the processes that ended apprenticeship, including petitioning the state and negotiating new labour relations.

From 1807 onwards, bilateral slave-trade treaties stipulated how naval squadrons would rescue slaves from slave ships, and how states should arrange the settlement and apprenticeship of these slaves, to transform them into ‘liberated Africans’. Comparing interactions between the state and liberated Africans at sea along the South African and Brazilian coasts, and in the port towns of Cape Town and Salvador, reveals how the legal status of liberated Africans changed over time. Current scholarship has framed liberated Africans in terms of whether they were attributed rights or suffered re-enslavement, and thus focused on their solidarity through claiming rights, ‘ethnic survivals’ or creolization. Instead, this paper argues anti-slave-trade legislation ascribed to liberated Africans a set of unguaranteed entitlements – promises regarding status and treatment without obligating states to uphold that status or treatment. By focusing on the precise aspects of legislation that operated at each point in the process of anti-slave-trade activity – rescuing slaves from slave ships, transportation to a port, processing through a court, and apprenticeship – this paper unearths how the law came into force in the encounter between state officials and liberated Africans, as part of the complex transition from slavery to free labour.

This paper considers scholarship on political culture in Jamaica in 1865, the year of the Morant Bay rebellion. It situates the historiography of political culture in relation to three trends: first, an older historiography that envisaged the rebellion as indicative of nationalist consciousness; second, a more recent focus on the local politics of protest in the period 1838–1900; and third, another recent approach of explaining political culture through the dynamic relationship between metropole and colony. The paper then goes on to suggest that the latter two approaches are congenial to analysing the Underhill Meetings, a set of key political discussions prior to the rebellion which nevertheless have been underutilized in the historiography. The paper concludes by considering the possible linkages between the Underhill Meetings and the reform initiatives of the post-rebellion colonial state. Overall, it argues for the possibility of island-wide political consciousness without the need for ethno-nationalism or “imagined communities”.