Faculty Affairs and Academic Programs
Myles Ali
Humanities
History and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies
UC Merced
Captive Lives: Experiences of Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Sierra Leone
As an awardee, I will conduct final archival research for and finish writing my first monograph, Captive Lives: Experiences of Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Sierra Leone, which will serve as the key component for my tenure promotion in my discipline of history. Upon its completion and subsequent publication, Captive Lives will provide a new history of slavery and freedom in the British colony of Sierra Leone in West Africa during the late nineteenth century. This monograph utilizes a rich and wide array of colonial, abolitionist, and ecclesiastical archival sources – documents that contain the names, ages, ethnicities, origins, former enslavers, families, and even transcribed testimonials of survivors and victims of slavery. Drawing on these records, Captive Lives offers new insights on the demography of Sierra Leone’s captive population, the prevalence of slaveholding, and the forced and voluntary movement of enslaved women, men, and children within the colony and its coastal and interior hinterlands. Using micro-historical analysis, this project reconstructs and animates the quotidian lives of the enslaved, from their family units and social networks to their labor, mistreatment, and strategies of self-liberation. By foregrounding the unique, significant – and often overlooked – identities and experiences of thousands of enslaved people in colonial Sierra Leone, Captive Lives adds new perspectives to the interconnected histories of slavery and freedom in West Africa and the wider Atlantic World.
