Maeve Ryan – författare

How the suppression of the slave trade and the “disposal” of liberated Africans shaped the emergence of modern humanitarianism  Between 1808 and 1867, the British navy’s Atlantic squadrons seized nearly two thousand slave ships, “re-capturing” almost two hundred thousand enslaved people and resettling them as liberated Africans across sites from Sierra Leone and Cape Colony to the West Indies, Brazil, Cuba, and beyond. In this wide-ranging study, Maeve Ryan explores the set of imperial experiments that took shape as British authorities sought to order and instrumentalise the liberated Africans, and examines the dual discourses of compassion and control that evolved around a people expected to repay the debt of their salvation. Ryan traces the ideas that shaped “disposal” policies towards liberated Africans, and the forms of resistance and accommodation that characterized their responses. This book demonstrates the impact of interventionist experiments on the lives of the liberated people, on the evolution of a British antislavery “world system,” and on the emergence of modern understandings of refuge, asylum, and humanitarian governance.

Competing visions of the future are at the heart of debates on climate change. The daunting scale and characteristics of climate risks have led to terrifying prophesies of societal breakdown and escalating geopolitical flashpoints. Although these cannot be ignored, the same characteristics can intersect to heighten the potential for "convergence points", in which cooperation and transformation are catalysed by shared risks and recognition of mutual vulnerability. In navigating between entrenched geopolitical logics and transformative possibilities, this book provides readers with a vocabulary and a framework for assessing climate risk in ways that are both critical and creative; rooted in current structures but not limited by them. Thinking about climate futures, the authors show, means embracing radically different possibilities and seeing the world as it is (and the forces that have produced present realities), while remaining open to the possibility of it becoming otherwise.