Cities of Refuge? British Men-of-War and the Right of Asylum

The Fugitive Slave Circular (1875) – admiralty instructions issued to curb the admission of refugee slaves on British men-of-war ships – caused a furor. Seen as an affront to the traditions of abolitionism and asylum, the opposition spoke loudly against what threatened to become a color-scale for refuge. Political refugees and fugitive slaves ought to be treated the same; personal liberty was to be secured first and foremost. The law went even further. Not only did the British have to secure liberty, the Slave Trade Act of 1824 required government to provide for slaves of other nations.

Yet, the technicalities of refuge proved burdensome. By the 1870s, financial and diplomatic concerns restricted the development of havens for those in British care and taxed the universalistic impulse behind the establishment of African asylums. The geopolitics of settling refugee slaves and of engaging with the “less advanced” moral codes of non-Western slave-holding empires rendered the effort anything but color-blind.
As a part of my project on the contours of British refuge in the 19th century, this paper proposes to explore how the provisioning of refuge to these particular refugees extended British imperial authority and, as seen through the fulcrum of the fugitive slave debates, exposed its limits. Such an exploration will provide a window into debates over the comity of nations as applied to African and Eastern empires; moreover, it will offer an understanding of how relief, before it was the purview of international committees, was a component of Western empire building. In this vein, the paper will offer insight into the establishment of settler colonies in Africa – colonies of refugees that had to contend with ethnic differences, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, shouldering the fate of British imperial humanitarianism and moral authority on the international scene.