Reckoning with Slavery's Legacies

Britain was heavily involved in the Atlantic slave trade, but some suggest that the slate was wiped clean through early British support for abolition. This book disputes that argument. Focusing on the abolitionist colony and colonial protectorate of Sierra Leone, the authors show that slavery did not die when British colonial rule was applied to this portion of the upper West African coast. The British had economic reasons for quietly prolonging the life of slavery as an African institution in the interior of Sierra Leone, where they did not enact abolition until 1928.This book makes the case that institutional legacies associated with this colonial prolongation of slavery underpinned the horrifying violence of the notorious civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. The book seeks a more honest reckoning with the legacy of slavery in slave-exporting regions to better support a more peaceful, equitable global future.