Over 800 000 enslaved people in select British colonies were emancipated by parliamentary legislation in 1833: the emancipation that freed the largest number of people in the Atlantic world before the US Civil War. Alongside the Haitian Revolution, British legislative emancipation became a touchstone for antislavery activists throughout the Atlantic world. But legislative emancipation also resulted in significant social conflict over the meaning of freedom. The formerly enslaved endured “apprenticeship,” a modified form of forced labor, until 1838, and further attempts to discipline plantation labor afterward. Scholars have studied various dimensions of this “problem of freedom,” in which colonial authorities sought to reproduce the socioeconomic conditions of slavery, thereby encountering wide-ranging resistance by freed people.

This panel provides new perspectives on this history by examining the legacies and transformations from the period of formal slavery to contested projects of emancipation. Emancipation was not uniform across British Caribbean territories. Although it precipitated a decline in plantation production in Jamaica, emancipation coexisted with the expansion of plantations in territories conquered during the Napoleonic Wars, such as Demerara (in present-day Guyana) and Trinidad. The apprenticeship system built upon prior regimes of bonded labor, including ideas and practices from slave-trade suppression and attempts to “ameliorate” slavery.

Recent scholarship from across the Atlantic world has emphasized the long-running legal struggles by enslaved people and their allies to achieve emancipation. Scholars have also foregrounded the afterlives of slavery that endured after legal emancipation. Learning from these interventions, this panel rethinks the politics of emancipation by tracing continuities from earlier periods.

Connolly connects state power to protect and coerce enslaved people from the Spanish law of slavery to British laws of amelioration and free labor in Trinidad. Richards studies records from prize courts and commissions of inquiry to reveal the legal strategies of captive people “liberated” from slaving ships by maritime patrols and forced into bonded labor. Murphy analyses Slave Registers from St. Lucia and Trinidad to foreground how enslaved people experienced the quotidian changes produced by abolitionist projects. By analyzing neglected sources and using innovative methods, the panelists provide a new framework that connects the laws and policies of slave-trade suppression, amelioration, and gradual emancipation.