2007/10/01 by R. J. M. Blackett · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Colonialism, slavery, and trade
paper · doi:10.1093/maghis/21.4.19
openalex publication_date 2007/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
From the inception of the antislavery movement, both in Great Britain and the United States, colonization which called for the removal of freed people from the place of their enslavement, seemed to provide an answer to the troubling question: what was to be done with the Negro? Its first and, some would say, most daring experiment was in the establishment of Sierra Leone by British abolitionists in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The colony was made up almost entirely of former American slaves who had retreated to London with the British at the end of the Revolutionary War. Although the colony soon fell on hard times its numbers were later replenished with emigrants from Nova Scotia and other parts of the Maritime provinces. In spite of a checkered history, some British abolitionists kept faith with colonization well into the nineteenth century, organizing an elaborate and ultimately unsuccessful...