Book Launch and Roundtable

Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution, published by Yale University Press, is a new history of British antislavery. In Sierra Leone, at the time a small British colony with an antislavery pedigree, the vague promises of the 1807 abolition of the British slave trade became a program of coerced labour, military conquest and ambitious social engineering. The people released from slavery by Royal Navy ships were no longer enslaved, but were expected to repay the ‘debt’ they owed to Britain for their freedom. The history of British antislavery has been written as a history of the triumph of enlightened good intentions over greed and brutality – Freedom’s Debtors shows that antislavery, on the edge of the British empire, was profit-seeking, exploitative and intrusive – the seedbed of British colonialism in West Africa.

This roundtable discussion of the book was followed by refreshments. Copies of the book were available for sale at a discounted price.

Dr Padraic X. Scanlan is Assistant Professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Research Associate at the Joint Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. Freedom’s Debtors is his first book.

Dr Bronwen Everill, College Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge

Dr Nicholas Guyatt, Reader in North American History, University of Cambridge

The Department of International History (@lsehistory) teaches and conducts research on the international history of Britain, Europe and the world from the early modern era up to the present day.