Planning for Atlantic Slave Trade “Refugees”

This article derives from a larger research project focused on individual demographic and social information collected from almost five thousand liberated Africans by British authorities in the Caribbean in the 1810s and 1820s. That project connects these records to current discussions among historians about the fraught nature of slavery-related archives, and the creative possibilities for understanding African lives through those archives. However, the intensive British bureaucratic project developed around the initial settlement of liberated Africans readily invites reflection on the long evolution of colonial and postcolonial policymaking related to other populations (especially non-European) designated for special or specialized management from the nineteenth century to the present. This article is such a reflection.

The data collected about African recaptives in the 1810s reported what initially happened to them shortly after their arrival in the Caribbean, including physical descriptions and reports of their placement in different kinds of employment, including the military. The discussion here uses data sampled from a cumulative version of these reports from the 1810s that was presented to the British Parliament in 1821.

Faced with a newly arrived slave ship, with dozens or hundreds of people who were in effect refugees, forcibly displaced from their places of origin and destined to remain where they disembarked, local authorities no doubt valued immediately available employment options, among which the West India regiments became the most prominent, at least during the first two decades of slave trade suppression (Anderson and Lovejoy 2020).While slave trade laws and later international treaties declared Africans rescued from illegally operating slave ships to be free, they were still people involuntarily removed from their home communities, and in policing the slave trade, the British government had no plans to attempt to return them to their places of origin. Further, given the fact that wars played a significant role in causing people to be sold as captives into the Atlantic slave trade, attempting to return people to their home communities would have in many cases proved impractical. In these ways, liberated Africans faced circumstances similar to other kinds of refugees, although neither legal nor administrative language described them as such; and contemporaneous ideas about slavery and race shaped their experience arguably more than ideas about displaced people with “protected status.”

Recent studies by Jenny Martínez (2012) and Maeve Ryan (2022) have put British slave trade suppression policies into conversation with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of international law and global human rights policy. Ryan, for example, argues that the extensive work of the British government in managing Africans rescued from illegal slave ships “was the beginning of a process whereby humanitarian discourses, dispositions, justifications and rationalities began to infuse and shape the exercise of colonial governance across the wider British empire after 1814” (2022: 7). Policy decisions about the earliest liberated Africans who landed in the Caribbean were of course also related to broader governmental ideas about African populations and the economic and geopolitical future of Caribbean colonies. However, as often occurs with modern displaced populations, immediate practical concerns about settlement and subsistence also influenced decision-making. Even looking back on what became a century of British empire building between 1815 and 1914, Ronald Hyam cautions against presuming too coherent a set of goals holding that empire together ([1976, 1993] 2002: 1–3). Without overstating the political sameness of British policy positions over long periods, meaningful connections can be made between imperial approaches to mobile subject populations in the 1800s and the development of policies around migrant populations, especially from the Global South, in the twenty-first century (Samaddar 2020: 43–47). Analyzing what he terms a Postcolonial Age of Migration, Samaddar reflects historically on the transportation of Asian laborers around the globe in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, and on labor migrations, especially of women and children, in Australia, North America, and Europe. The case of the earliest liberated Africans settled in the Caribbean also resonates with policymaking in the early 2000s related to migrant, displaced and refugee populations who end up in what Jennifer Hyndman and Wenona Giles have termed “extended exile” (2017). While liberated Africans from illegally operating slave ships did not have countries of origin recognized under the kinds of international regimes that exist today, they were designated as people illegitimately displaced who could not readily return to their former home territories. The increasingly powerful British colonial state determined that the most feasible outcome for these slave trade refugees was settlement in British colonies under labor regimes and social rules crafted by that emerging and increasingly dominant state. As Hyndman and Giles note, all “[m]odes of managing refugees are an expression of past and present geopolitics, economic development and social regulation” (2017: 74).

This Special Themed Section of Migration and Society explores the colonial and postcolonial genealogies of refugee “management” from the nineteenth-century height of European imperialism to the present global age—an era of population and border regulation whose ideological foundations, as noted in the Introduction (Lemberg-Pedersen et al., this issue), are far less “novel” than often portrayed. Martin Lemberg-Pedersen (2019) draws productive comparisons between anti-slave-trade politics of the nineteenth century and the recent tendency of contemporary European governments to frame diverse changes in border control policies in humanitarian terms. In both cases, governments have represented their activities as missions fixed “only on rescue of victims in the here-and-now,” eliding the “colonial matrices of power” shaping policy decisions (2019: 251–253). Lemberg-Pederson points out that, for both Atlantic slave trade monitoring in 1800s and what he terms “asylum politics” in the early 2000s, European policymakers—even when claiming the language of humanitarianism—have most often worked from a colonial assumption that governments in the Global North have wide-ranging rights to control the circumstances of displacement faced by disparate refugees who come mostly from the Global South.

In addition to setting the history of Africans rescued from the slave trade alongside more modern refugee studies, comparisons with other categories of displaced, trafficked, or resettled groups might be contemplated. Nonetheless, the “refugee” analogy works well in several ways. The consideration of nineteenth-century Africans rescued from illegally operating slave ships as “refugees” uses this characterization in a context that long pre-dates contemporary legal and popular meanings of the term based on Article 1 of the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees and the related 1967 Protocol. British slave trade suppression policies recognized Africans from illegal slave ships as people subject to a form of mistreatment (illicit transportation as captive laborers far from their territories of origin) and unable to secure protection from this kind of enslavement in the African communities from which they came. This framework compares well in notable ways with later understandings of flight from persecution, although these Africans did not themselves flee from enslavement or expressly request protection from Great Britain or other governments engaged in slave trade suppression. Consistent with Lemberg- Pedersen's arguments, British authorities assumed that the strongest protection against the Atlantic slave trade would come from governments in Europe, or the Americas, even as various West African polities attempted to resist long-distance and overseas slave trafficking on their own terms (Diouf 2003). Fear that Africans taken from illegal slave ships could be re-enslaved if returned to their home communities was one of the many arguments used during the 1800s to justify the resettlement of these people in British colonial territories. While British colonies relied until 1838 on the hereditary enslavement of the descendants of people trafficked through the Atlantic slave trade, and continued to broadly exploit Black people, based on their membership in “a particular social group” (people of African descent), the 1807 law did recognize Africans taken from illegal slave ships as a somewhat protected category of displaced persons. This article addresses the nature and limits of that recognition and categorization for liberated African settlement in its earliest years.

Over the nineteenth century, both governmental authorities and private actors in the Caribbean came to view Africans rescued from Atlantic slave ships as potentially useful laborers, especially for more recently acquired colonial territories, which could no longer rely on enslaved people to provide agricultural labor. For example, in his pioneering study of Africans taken by the British from illegally operating slave ships, Johnson Asiegbu offered a detailed account and critique of the project that emerged in the 1840s to run organized ships of indentured African laborers from Sierra Leone to the Caribbean. The British colony of Sierra Leone became the main processing site for Africans emancipated through British slave trade suppression policies. The British Navy rescued over 250,000 such people and ultimately about 15 percent of them ended up in these more formal indentured labor schemes, mostly in the 1840s and 1850s (Asiegbu 1969). These arrangements served as precursors to the systems of indentured labor employed by Great Britain and other governments for many decades after slave emancipation. Between the 1840s and 1910s, European colonial governments deployed Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian immigrant workers in multiple locations around the Caribbean, attempting to replace the work force of enslaved Africans and people of African descent, who resisted the idea of continuing plantation work after receiving legal freedom. Abolitionists and later historians criticized all these programs as functioning in ways similar to the racialized chattel slavery, which they supposedly replaced (Kale 1998; Laurence 1982, 1994; Look Lai 2004, Yun 2009). Moon-Ho Jung makes important observations concerning evolving multinational ideas about race and labor related to people of both Asian and African descent in the nineteenth century (Jung 2008).

In the case of Africans rescued from slave ships, sending groups of such people across the Atlantic to the Americas in immigrant transport ships literally mimicked the ocean journeys and life experiences of the Atlantic slave trade. Tellingly, British authorities referred to the Africans rescued sometimes as “liberated Africans,” occasionally as “African recaptives” and at times even as “captured Negroes.” The latter two terms emphasize their status as people considered not entirely free by the colonial state, although liberated from slave ships. Numerous observers have viewed this process as a transfer of exploitable labor from one imperial or national power to another: Great Britain rescued liberated Africans from slave ships headed to Cuba, Brazil, or the United States, only to redirect the labor of those of captives to British colonies, principally British Guiana, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Sierra Leone (Conrad 1986; Mamigonian 2017; Martínez-Fernández 1998; Schmidt-Nowara 1999; Sanjurjo 2021). In this way, the settlement of liberated Africans, especially in the 1840s and 1850s looked as much like a kind of imperial competition over labor as it did a humanitarian mission.

Nevertheless, the significant documentation around liberated African settlement clearly shows that reformist and even humanitarian impulses competed with other imperatives in the development of settlement policies. Exploration of the first two decades of these policies puts that ideological competition into sharp relief. Furthermore, attention to such policy debates and to the diverse experiences of the African settlers involved sheds light on nineteenth-century ideas about race, labor, and state-led social management.

British Abolition Policies: Beyond Humanitarian/Moral Celebration

The history of both European and American abolition politics has seen numerous revisions during the past half century. Moving away from early impulses to portray anti-slavery activists as largely selfless moral actors, scholars have sought to unpack the more complicated political and social motives that led to the long series of formal laws and other kinds of regulation that gradually ended the institution of racialized chattel slavery during the nineteenth century (Brown 2006; Sinha 2017). Addressing continuities between the nineteenth-century colonial politics and contemporary migration policies requires attention to this more tortuous political history. While Denmark in 1792 became the first European colonial nation to outlaw its Atlantic slave trade (though not slave ownership), the Slave Trade Abolition Law passed by Great Britain in 1807 became the most globally consequential. This was because the British had the naval and political power with which to attempt widespread slave trade policing along the African coast and in the Americas. Great Britain took a leading role in many of the international dimensions of the struggle for emancipation between the 1770s and 1870s, but this anti-slavery work must be contextualized with the fact that England, and then the United Kingdom, had also served as a leading colonial power in the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade and widespread Black enslavement in the Americas between the 1500s and 1700s. Even before the establishment of significant and economically viable English colonies in the mid-1600s, English ships had both legally and illegally transported enslaved Africans into Spanish colonies in Central and South America (Eltis 1999; Palmer 1981; Wheat 2016). Later, the English colonies of Barbados and Jamaica would play a pioneering role in developing slave-based sugar agriculture in the Caribbean, and this economic model would consume more African lives than any other single economic activity in what historians now describe as the Atlantic slavery system (Solow 1991).

In an article exploring the relationship between moral intentions and other political goals, Chaim D. Kaufman and Robert A. Pape characterized British slave trade suppression as a “costly international moral action” (1999: 632–633, emphasis added; see also Hamilton 2009). Even where British officials expressly sought to develop settlement policies that would economically or otherwise benefit their own colonies, there were also obvious moral, or at least reformist impulses, which affected decision-making in the distant centers of government in London as well as on the ground in the Caribbean. These officials had multiple ideas about what roles Black labor should fill within colonial economies and under European colonial governance. They also had ideas about the kinds of social policies that would demonstrate the rightness or even beneficence of colonial rule. It was assumed that reasonably healthy, working, free Africans, learning Western cultural and religious norms would not only produce economic success and social peace, but would also showcase ideal governance. The idea that liberated Africans might become some version of not only “model laborers” but “model settlers” ran throughout much of the early documentation of slave trade suppression.

Abolition Archives: Tracing Early African Recaptive/Liberated African Settlement

In the period before 1830, approximately five thousand liberated Africans arrived in British Caribbean colonies from Atlantic slave ships seized on suspicion of having violated the 1807 Abolition Law. About three thousand men, women, and children of this total ended up settled in the three colonies of Antigua, the Bahamas, and Tortola before 1820. Here I focus on the earliest large groups from those Atlantic ships; and draw mostly from the three colonies that received the greatest numbers. Between 1807 and 1819, Antigua received 1,388 liberated Africans, the Bahamas, 694, and Tortola, 789. Additionally, Barbados received 160 Africans from a single slave ship, with about half of this group being settled in Barbados and the remaining half settled in the nearby island of Saint Vincent. The Abolition Law of 1807 and the subsequent Order in Council of 1808 (which outlined procedures for enforcing the law), required the Collectors of Customs in colonies receiving these people to supervise their placement with the military or in other employment, and to keep records of their well-being at the time of their arrival and over the period of their initial settlement. As the Order in Council limited labor indentures to periods of fourteen years, some Customs Collectors indicated that, after apprenticeships concluded, they would not include such individuals in any annual report. In the late 1820s, the Colonial Office would initiate a separate examination of these settled communities with information-gathering both by specially appointed commissioners and by local officials (Rupprecht 2012). Earliest recordkeeping, however, rested primarily with the Collectors of Customs.

Settling recaptives with carefully tracked deliberateness suggested a potentially different ontological status for these Africans in contrast to the hundreds of thousands of Atlantic slave ship captives who came before. Among historians of Black enslavement, there is currently considerable interest in what is sometimes termed the “violence of the archive” (Fuentes 2016). That is, scholars are exploring the ways especially colonial, racialized—and often explicitly racist—recordkeeping processes silence, mischaracterize, and distort the very humanity of many subaltern subjects; even as scholars have little choice but to rely on those archives in attempting to build non-elite understandings of the history of slavery, or histories of slavery “from below” (Rediker 2022). Paradoxically, in the case of these earliest liberated African records, humanizing mandates of the recordkeeping may have outpaced the actual humanizing impact of the real-life settlement processes.

As one further element of their duties, these Collectors of Customs also fell into a quasi- anthropological role, documenting not only the age, gender, and basic physical health of new African arrivals but also more detailed characteristics, including cultural scarification, and in hundreds of cases, the recording of the African given names which the recaptives themselves claimed. The more basic demographic information fit into a kind of census-taking rubric and was also related to the making of suitable labor placements. Meanwhile, descriptions of cultural scarification and ordinary scars or injuries could serve to identify people or distinguish them from one another. Recording African names did not imply any encouragement that the slave trade refugees keep those names in their new lives as a part of the British-colonized Caribbean. In the case of the Bahamas, the Collector of Customs used two columns, one for recording an African name and one for the recording of a “Christian” name. Meanwhile, the Collector of Customs in Antigua did not include African names at all.

Just as abolitionists compared the deployment of liberated African laborers under terms of indenture to the labor exploitation of captive Africans by slaveholders, one might also compare some of this recordkeeping to that of slave owners in earlier decades. However, few slaveholders invested in this kind of detail for large groups of people, particularly not the documentation that implied some specific human value on each individual. For example, a slaveholder might note at length scarification or injuries or multiple names or reputed familial ties for an enslaved person who had run away, but these records were not at all a matter of course for most enslaved people during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Furthermore, as government documentation, these records—and the experience of their collection—made a bureaucratic and epistemological statement about the place of these new African arrivals within the British empire, and within the individual societies in which they found themselves. State monitoring and recording of African recaptive populations did not inevitably create humanizing practices. Indeed, as scholars of Black enslavement have shown, data collection itself often did critical dehumanizing work (Fuentes 2016; Rosenthal 2018; Smallwood 2007). Still, the effort of British bureaucracy to document its enforcement of the 1807 Abolition Law created records that provide analytical perspective on how everyday outcomes worked for some of these refugees from the Atlantic slave trade. The focus of this article on government records also highlights the state ideological role in the outcomes that recaptives experienced.

African Recaptives in the Caribbean: Refugees, Settlers, or a New Colonial Workforce?

For at least a decade and usually more, these Africans overwhelmingly found themselves as bound laborers either in the military or with private employers, including colonial officials themselves. The large group of liberated Africans settled in Antigua came from five different vessels. In the case of 211 people from the Spanish schooner San José y Ánimas, authorities provided considerable detail about their employment. While 61 men and boys entered the 3rd West India Regiment, over ten different kinds of employers appeared in the assignments for everyone else. The work to which these Africans were assigned included barrel-making, carpentry, fishing, masonry, and shipbuilding as well as household domestic service. Overwhelmingly, women and girls received domestic service assignments. Also noteworthy is the fact that even employers who identified themselves as “planters” mostly indicated the intention to apprentice their new African workers in some skilled trade. In the case of the slave ship Carlos, which arrived with 411 captives, at least 40 people died, while 55 entered the military; and again, all the women and girls are listed as “domestics.” All the men and boys who were not enlisted as soldiers were reportedly learning skilled trades. Curiously, in the case of two French slave ships La Belle and Hermione seized in September and October 1815, reports state that all of the Africans in both cases “were taken by His Excellency the Commander of the Forces for His Majesty's Service.”² La Belle had brought 512 Africans and the Hermione had brought 211, so through this process more than half of all liberated Africans landed in Antigua found themselves under the supervision of the British Army. Although the slave trade abolition act expressly permitted the enlistment of liberated Africans in this way, the decision here by authorities in Antigua stands out. It seems that the Collector of Customs, with the support of other local officials, in effect outsourced to the British Army the challenges associated with settling this large refugee population. Local correspondence might reveal directly stated or implied motives for this action (such motives might be traceable, for example, through correspondence between Antigua and colonial officials in London). Did local officials view the structure and control of military authority as a straightforward and logical process of managing the new African population? Or did military supervision simply prove quicker and more convenient than laboriously executing over seven hundred indenture contracts? Did the civilian authorities view the job of socializing (or “civilizing”) so large a group of Africans at one time as involving too much administrative and social work; especially thinking about “social work” in the more modern sense of the term—deploying governmental staff and volunteers to assist people in managing their daily lives?

Neither the Bahamas nor Tortola, the other two territories receiving large numbers of liberated Africans in this period, adopted any similar mass placement of African men, women, and children under the control of the army. In the case of the Bahamas, most of the 694 Africans settled between 1807 and 1818 came from four slave ships, three seized in 1811 and one in 1816. The slave ship Atrevido (also called Carolina) surrendered 204 Africans after seizure by the Royal Navy in May 1811 (Slave Voyages). Of these Central Africans embarked as captives from the River Congo, only 46 ended up in the West Indian regiments. After enlistment in the military, the next most common specific outcome recorded for this group was employment under apprenticeship to people described as “planters.” The 23 people employed in this way likely had lives that looked similar to generations of enslaved Africans before them around the Americas; but they only constituted 20 percent of the total group, a far lower percentage of agricultural laborers than was normal among the enslaved. Indeed, the first British Order in Council that outlined procedures for settling Africans rescued from illegal slave ships after 1807 recommended that non-agricultural labor should be given preference for these labor contracts. Most notably, more than a third of the Africans from the Atrevido were simply recorded as being assigned as apprentices to local individuals of unspecified occupation. This unevenness in the data is a notable challenge in these detailed but inconsistent settlement records. It is difficult to fully assess the underlying ideologies of either government actors or private employers, with so much discretion allowed in whether precise kinds of employment were recorded. Did the Collector of Customs in Nassau specifically note the “planter” employers because of expressed concerns by abolitionists and others that liberated Africans expressly not be treated as enslaved agricultural laborers? Apprenticed workers in all forms of labor might face mistreatment or slave-like conditions, but, especially in the Caribbean, mass agricultural field labor heavily defined slave status; and in the era of abolition the negative connotations and stigma of that kind of work significantly influenced some political debates.

The other two groups of liberated Africans who arrived in the Bahamas in the summer of 1811 saw similar labor distribution as those from the Atrevido; with some variation. During the 1810s, economically and socially prominent members of the White population actively questioned authorities in the Bahamas about whether or not liberated Africans should be viewed as economically useful or socially troublesome (Adderley 2006: 23–62). The first years of liberated African settlement constituted less an attempt to really answer that question, but more a real-time experiment in which officials in both the colony and the metropole hoped for a positive or at least neutral answer. The use of African recaptives in roles previously occupied by enslaved laborers was viewed by some as a path to demonstrating that Caribbean economies could succeed without the violence and coercive structures of slavery. Yet most observers also recognized the inherent risk of labor exploitation in colonial Caribbean contexts. These nineteenth-century debates, although closely tied to the drawn-out ending of chattel slavery in the Americas, also resonate with proposals in the early 2000s related to how European, US, or global economies might benefit from the productive use of the labor of modern refugees. Alexander Betts and Paul Collier (2017), for example, champion the idea of creating special economic programs that might hire displaced people in the Global South before they decide to migrate to the Global North. Just as in the case of Africans rescued from slave ships, these proposals related to deploying refugees as a workforce have met with significant critique related to the inherent potential for refugee exploitation (Crawley 2017). Brett Shadle (2018) has also noted the fact that during the early and mid-1900s in Africa, questions around refugee populations sometimes overlapped with questions of labor, usefulness, and colonial encouragement or coercion of particular economic activities from African populations.

The discussions about how to deploy newly emancipated Africans from illegal slave ships in the Caribbean related in their own era to the issue of avoiding emancipated people ending up in “slave-like” work conditions. Even beyond special economic zones, present-day analysts argue that in general good refugee settlement policies can focus on potentially useful outcomes for local economies (Betts 2021). Betts and Collier (2017) specifically suggest that economically valuable deployment of refugee labor could help reluctant taxpayers from viewing refugee support as an economically burdensome humanitarian project. The labor plans for liberated Africans also considered their future potential for economic self-sufficiency. The term “apprentice” used in this context gestured in part toward the idea expressed in the Order in Council for enforcing the Slave Trade Abolition Law that African recaptives should be indentured into “trades, handicrafts or employments” with a view to their being able to support themselves after their terms of apprenticeship ended.³ Future economic self-sufficiency is a perennial concern in the resettlement of present-day refugee populations, and it is a concern that is neither inherently racialized nor colonial, being expressed by policymakers in diverse national and cultural contexts. Of course, British policies for African receptive settlement developed in a context deeply related to colonialism, slavery, and potential future emancipation.

African Recaptive Settlement as (Failed) Colonial Humanitarian Policy in an Anti-Slavery Age

Looking at liberated Africans and other emancipated people in Sierra Leone and at British settlement schemes for formerly enslaved populations in Kenya and South Africa, Bronwen Everill argues that British colonialism on the African continent developed “a certain type of humanitarian interventionist institution that also emerged from the anti-slavery movement: the anti-slavery settlement” (2013: 24). As the earliest British version of this idea (founded in 1787), Sierra Leone became to some extent a template, infused with ideas about what a “model” settlement might be, for ending slavery and promoting Western ideas of civilization and economic activity in Africa. Everill's case studies of the Kat River Settlement in South Africa and Frere Town in Kenya were founded in the 1820s and 1870s respectively and involved inspiration from the prior example of Sierra Leone. Everill situates all these efforts as a part of the colonial and postcolonial genealogy of what would become “the modern refugee camp.” Black populations from England and the Americas formed the initial settlers of the British colony in Sierra Leone, but after 1807 the people rescued from slave ships became by far the largest settler group of that colonial project (Anderson 2020). Africans from illegal slave ships also constituted a population that literally bridged the era of slavery, the coming of emancipation and the development of a British post-slavery colonial project. Recent years have seen increased attention to the place of this population in the making of British colonialism, the development of ideas about humanitarian governance and in the making of international legal regimes related to purportedly humanitarian goals (Haslam 2020; Lester and Dussart 2014; Martínez 2012; Ryan 2011). Martin Lemberg-Pedersen (2019) emphasizes the character of slave trade suppression as a policy related to “border control,” “migration governance,” and population “surveillance,” in addition to its more commonly discussed place among policies related to the ending of Atlantic slavery. Lemberg-Pedersen also points out that the arrangements for settling Africans rescued from illegally operating slave ships in British Caribbean colonies or in Sierra Leone share significant ideological characteristics with contemporary migration policies that prioritize externalization; that is, the settlement of refugees—whatever their humanitarian claims—in territories outside the wealthy policymaking centers of the Global North.

In her work on Sierra Leone, Maeve Ryan has emphasized that the Liberated African Department in this British West African colony ended up at the center of an ongoing series of tensions between the practicalities of securing sustenance, housing and employment for recaptives, managing the significant administrative recordkeeping for tens of thousands of slave trade refugees, and the diverse cultural expectations of colonial authorities, employers, and other members of society about how to incorporate recaptives into British colonial society in Sierra Leone. In Ryan's words, British authorities managing liberated Africans in Sierra Leone ended up working with “interwoven ideologies of humanitarian responsibility, racial hierarchy, and calculated instrumentalism” (Ryan 2016a: 12). Considering the theme of externalization, it is also worth remembering that the conception of Sierra Leone as an organized British colonial territory began in the late 1780s as a place in which diverse groups of free Black people might be settled, rather than their ending up in England. Ryan further notes that, while some historians have traced the British anti-slavery origins of “humanitarian governance” to attempts during the 1820s to “ameliorate” the conditions for enslaved Black workers in British colonies, the elaborate projects and debates around settling Africans rescued from illegal slave ships in Sierra Leone, suggest that such origins should be dated earlier in the years immediately following 1807 (2016a: 12). The validity of Ryan's argument is well demonstrated in the early Caribbean settlement projects explored here.

However, in these Caribbean colonies, the fraught experimentation between humanitarian care, labor exploitation, and European “civilization” goals also occurred in the midst of societies that had been almost exclusively shaped by racial slavery since the 1600s. In the early settlement of African recaptives in Antigua, the Bahamas, and Tortola, centuries of mass dehumanization of people of African descent encountered a small, and decidedly partial attempt, at what abolitionists might have hoped could be mass re-humanization of thousands of Africans “rescued” and “liberated” from the horrors of slavery. This all occurred roughly two decades before British policy attempted to enact more general emancipation. Anita Rupprecht (2014: 94) has argued that the formal Commission, which reviewed African recaptive experience in the 1820s, formed a part of “imperial efforts to find a script for the end of slavery” during a decade in which the later general Emancipation Act could be anticipated. However, she also critiques the relative “silence” from abolitionists about the quick deployment of so many African recaptives into military service in the early 1800s; and the way that the whole management of liberated African experience allowed “flimsy boundaries [between enslavement and freedom] to be drawn and redrawn” in often casual or ad hoc ways by local officials (Rupprecht 2014: 85). There is much justification for interpreting the settlement of liberated Africans as a humanitarian “failure” especially in the way that their labor conditions regularly looked similar to those of the enslaved. At the same time, in addition to looking backward to conditions of racial slavery, the genesis of African recaptive settlement policies is also a window into early patterns of colonial (and postcolonial) faltering over the management of presumed-inferior populations that fell under imperial or state control. This governmental faltering illuminates the compromised position of humanitarian goals even within a policy framework initiated in large part to end in the “inhumanity” of the Atlantic slave trade.

In Search of Human(e) Social Outcomes for African Recaptive Settlers?

As argued throughout this article, the compromised nature of potentially humanitarian goals stood out particularly starkly in the slavery-dominated Caribbean, noting that policies for the management of liberated Africans in the Caribbean changed in multiple ways during the nineteenth century, especially after emancipation for all enslaved people in British territories. What, then, can be gleaned from an examination of these very early settlement polices? The first decade of British liberated African settlement in the Caribbean explored here involved about 3,500 people or less than 2 percent of the nineteenth-century total of over 250,000 people rescued by the British Navy from Atlantic slave ships. In theory, this early moment embodied the best opportunity of the era to attempt humane or creative policies—both regarding liberated Africans themselves and as a part of envisioning non-slave futures for Black labor deployment in the Caribbean. It is worth noting that only in exceptional cases of extreme debility did British authorities simply expend resources for direct care and support over the long term. More generally, when direct care and support occurred, it either came through army budgets, as with the large numbers of people, including men, women, and children, consigned to the army in Antigua in 1815 or from employers who received indentured laborers. In fact, the legal guidance offered for enforcing slave trade abolition anticipated precisely this financial outcome, requiring government support only until the new African settlers were assigned to other supervision via enlistment or the so-called labor apprenticeships.⁴

In his accounting of four Africans under his supervision the southern Bahamas, customs collector John Sullivan offered a version of what abolitionists might have envisioned in their desires for how liberated African settlement might work in practice. Three young men (Yacha, Amoah, and Aboche) and a young woman (Acuswah) had all arrived in the Bahamas in 1811, survivors from the slave ship Joanna. All were indentured to employers on Acklins Island. The men were “employed in agriculture” and the woman as a domestic servant. Sullivan further reported: “These Africans continue to enjoy good health; and are well-clothed, got plenty of plantation fare, such as corn, potatoes, fish crabs, meat, &c. They are getting more acquainted with the English language, and are regular at their devotions, and begin to learn the creed, Lord's prayer, and catechism.”⁵ Sullivan also reported that Acuswah had two pregnancies, with one child dying as a newborn in 1814 and another who was thriving at six months of age in December 1815. These Africans had found themselves consigned to planters, in a somewhat remote location, doing work lamentably similar to people still enslaved. Yet Sullivan's intent seems to be to portray their lives and his administrative duties as a success story. In keeping their African names, having presumably desired pregnancies, and working near fellow liberated Africans, they seemed to enjoy some strong and relatively autonomous social ties. Meanwhile, in the eyes of the colonial state, these Africans were working for White employers in the principal kind of labor desired from Black workers in the Caribbean—agricultural and menial, for the benefit of established socioeconomic higher classes. The Africans themselves may have preferred other arrangements. They may also have had some independent economic activities that did not fall into the purview of Sullivan's assessment.

Even if one assumes that most of the first recaptives achieved similar outcomes to Yacha, Amoah Aboche and Acuswah, that outcome was relatively modest. British Caribbean settlement policies for the earliest African recaptives—the designated beneficiaries of the much-celebrated 1807 Abolition Law—prioritized practicality, ease, and working within the economic and social status quo, rather than pursuing more “radical” or more “humanitarian” possibilities. Yogita Goyal urges researchers comparing the era of Atlantic slavery to later histories of forced displacement “to avoid conflating past and present, [projecting] a hegemonic global north and a perpetually marginalized global south” and instead encourages greater “comparative literacy across past and present” (Goyal 2017: 544, 545). The history of early British policies toward liberated Africans covered in this article seeks to contribute to that kind of literacy. These settlement policies from the first decade after British slave trade abolition did not set in place a definitive set of values that clearly molded refugee regimes in later colonial and postcolonial eras. However, practicality, ease, and preserving an economic and social status quo with deep roots in European colonialism are values that continue to shape contemporary migration geopolitics despite often very pronounced humanitarian claims.