Compassion or control? Britain and the abolition of slavery with Dr Maeve Ryan

The HMS Derwent arrived in Freetown harbour, Sierra Leone in March 1808, escorting two captured American ships carrying 167 enslaved people. What made them unusual was that their journey was interrupted — they were not simply captives, but “recaptives.” No longer bound for the Americas, these “liberated Africans” were instead bound to the British Empire: one of the first groups of survivors of the Atlantic slave trade to be brought to a British colony under the newly operational Slave Trade Abolition Act of 1807. But what happened to these former slaves as they fell under the “protection” of the British Government?

The freedom into which they had been delivered—as they would learn—was not intended to mean anything more than freedom from being legally owned as chattel. Former slaves were expected to repay the debt of their salvation.

In this special Black History Month episode of the War Studies Podcast, Dr Maeve Ryan joins us to discuss her new book, which seeks to deepen our understanding of the conceptual origins and implications of British policies to manage and control liberated slaves, and its consequences for British foreign policy and the rest of the world throughout the 19th century.

She discusses the series of imperial experiments set up to resettle and integrate former slaves, with extremely variable and frequently tragic results. She examines how liberated slaves were argued over as resources, as labour units to be distributed or as objects of paternalistic concern and contempt, and as instruments in diplomatic confrontations.

She also shares how throughout, the liberated people found ways to disrupt and resist refusing to be a blank canvas onto which imperialist goals, ambitions, and fantasies could be imprinted. As such, they presented successive governments and generations of abolitionists with a complex series of moral, political, ideological, and practical challenges.

Find out more about Dr Maeve Ryan’s new book: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300251395/humanitarian-governance-and-the-british-antislavery-world-system/

Find out more about the Centre for Grand Strategy Maeve co-directs in the Department of War Studies: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/kcl-centre-for-grand-strategy