Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cc8bf7c57-j4qg9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-11T00:38:10.893Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction: “Liberated Africans” and Early International Courts of Humanitarian Effort

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2020

Get access

Summary

For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade involved an estimated 12.7 million enslaved Africans, while the Indian Ocean trade included more than a million people, but began much earlier and continued longer. Of the total number of people involved in these two transoceanic migrations, over one-quarter boarded slave ships after the British and US governments passed legislation restricting and ultimately prohibiting maritime human trafficking in 1807. As Britain negotiated international anti-slave-trade treaties thereafter, British, Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian, French, and US authorities began capturing ships suspected of illegal slave trading, raiding coastal barracoons, and detaining newly landed enslaved people in the Americas, Africa, the Caribbean, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean islands, Arabia, and India. In this coordinated effort, British naval courts, international mixed commissions, and local authorities decided the fate for tens of thousands of people around the Atlantic and Indian Ocean littorals. Between 1808 and 1896, this complex tribunal network “liberated” approximately two hundred thousand children, women, and men, although many more died during the Middle Passage or over the course of the judicial process. These people, frequently documented as “liberated Africans,” represent a sample of an estimated 6 percent of the total slave trade leaving Africa across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans between 1807 and 1896.

These individuals were designated “liberated Africans,” although in fact many of those people who were removed from slave ships and coastal prisons were not actually freed but were forced into periods of apprenticeship that were often documented. The records related to this special class of individuals are scattered in many archives around the world and are written in multiple languages. Cases adjudicated before a court usually generated documentation of the conditions of enslavement along the coast of West or East Africa, the events leading up to the seizure of the slave ship or the unlocking of some coastal prisons, the judicial process resulting in emancipation, and, for some, details of subsequent forced apprenticeship, which in many circumstances amounted to periods of indentured servitude.

Scholars have had varying interpretations of British naval interdiction and the functioning of these nineteenth-century anti-slave-trade courts. Some legal scholars have characterized the courts as ancestors of contemporary courts of human rights.

Type
Chapter

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×