War Studies

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 conceptua