Indenturing Re-captured Africans

Britain’s 1807 abolition of the slave trade meant that thousands of illegally trafficked Africans, who were intercepted by the Royal Navy when entering the Caribbean, were either indentured or enlisted for military service.

This project engages neglected colonial archives, containing hundreds of interviews with these Africans during the 1820s, to examine the impact of the policy on the ‘re- captured Africans’ who were neither enslaved nor freed. By constructing historical accounts their labouring lives, it analyses how they negotiated the Caribbean labour regime and thus complicated the abolitionist frameworks essential to race-making in the nineteenth century.