Review: Liberated Africans

During the industrial revolution, rise of capitalism, and transition to wage labor, the abolition of the slave trade disguised another type of slavery, known paradoxically as "Liberated Africans."The victims were "liberated," although they were not free.This digital humanities publication follows over 700,000 "Liberated Africans" who were emancipated from slavery through state intervention, and then subjected to involuntary indentures lasting several years or more.Between 1800 and 1920, Portugal, France, Britain, Spain, Brazil, Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Ottoman, and various Latin America republics developed a new labor force on a scale which has only recently come into global focus.Presented on maps, the website's archive features over 500 pieces of anti-slavery legislation and data for over 5,500 cases, which are organized on a government-by-government and court-by-court basis.These materials retrace indentured people from Africa through slave trade blockades and trials.This reference resource and humanities collection is still expanding, especially for adding lists of people and digitized sources to the archive which currently hosts over 2,000 PDFs for a single location: Freetown, Sierra Leone.Laws and cases form precedents in the legal history of human rights, slavery, abolition, indentured labor, colonization, and decolonization.This topic bridges the gap between legal slavery through government-run indentureship schemes and modern-day human trafficking.The audience for this material is broad and includes scholars, educators, students from secondary school onward, organizations creating informed media, genealogists, and the public.