"Liberated Africans" and the Problem of Freedom

The history of the global anti-slave-trade legal regime in the early nineteenth century reveals the interaction between the legal strategies of authoritarian empires and those of freed people. One prominent aspect of applying domestic and international laws against the slave trade was the deployment of maritime patrols that captured hundreds of slaving ships heading to the Americas. Around the Atlantic, courts adjudicated the legality of these maritime captures. Local officials assigned the liberated Africans from these ships into compulsory service, which formally lasted for up to fourteen years. After ordeals of maritime captivity and labor that bore many similarities to enslavement, these “liberated Africans” navigated their own paths.

Focusing on the legal paths of the liberated Africans sheds new light on how the regime operated. British imperial anti-slave-trade law commodified the slaving ship and its cargo—including captive people—as exchangeable for monetary compensation. The 1807 Abolition Act and its associated instruments assigned liberated Africans to military enlistment or bonded labor in urban and rural areas. Liberated Africans resisted this circumscribed emancipation. They used imperial legal structures, especially commissions of inquiry, to challenge exploitative work conditions and overturn attempts to enslave them. The legal regime’s techniques for paying compensation and assigning liberated Africans to bonded labor provided a precedent for general emancipation in 1833. Ultimately, the “problem of freedom” regarding the meaning of emancipation began not with legislative emancipation acts but rather with the much earlier anti-slave-trade laws.