Preliminary Programme

In the heart of the Indian Ocean and at the crossroads of century-old trade routes, the city of Colombo had been a social melting pot long before the Portuguese set foot on the island of Sri Lanka in the early 16th century. Over the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the immediate hinterland of Colombo grew exponentially, as the (partial) liberalisation of the trade ensured an increase of especially the Muslim and Chettiyar communities. A largely ignored group in this social transformation of Colombo's suburbs however, were the manumitted slaves from South and South-East Asia. Usually forgotten in the margins of history after the third or fourth generation, the first-generation free slaves and their families can finally be studied thanks to a proto-database of the hitherto hardly studied thombo registers. Datasets of the Colombo Four Gravets from the late seventeenth century and the 1760s allow us for the first time ever to gain insight into the socio-economic position of freed slaves in urban Sri Lanka and compare family trajectories and life courses over several generations to determine similarities and differences in life experiences of emancipated slaves and other social groups. (Show less)

In 1826, the Dutch government decreed that slave owners in the Dutch colony of Suriname had to register all enslaved persons in their possession and all changes in ownership. Registration was done in a central register until the abolition of slavery in Suriname in 1863. The registers give a continuous overview of the enslaved population in Suriname stretching for more than three decades. The level of information on the enslaved population of Suriname make the slave registers an exceptional source for the study of slavery. As part of the project ‘Make the Surinamese slave registers public’ a database of these registers was created. For this paper, we will combine this database with legal sources from the period 1840-1850 to study the life and times of escaped enslaved people in Suriname. (Show less)

This paper examines the growth of captive populations in Angola and São Tomé e Príncipe in the second half of the nineteenth century. It combines data from the online Counting Colonial Populations database with documentary evidence on plantation labour to study the role of coerced labour in the development of coffee and cocoa production in both Portuguese colonies. The settler plantations that emerged in Angola’s coffee belt around mid-century depended first on slave labour and when this became unlawful in 1869, they made use of different newly created legal mechanisms to keep workers and their offspring captive. Meanwhile, the expansion of coffee and cocoa plantations in São Tomé was long hampered by official restrictions on the maritime movement of captive labour from Angola. Paradoxically, the legal abolition of servitude in 1875 in the Portuguese empire facilitated the recruitment of huge numbers of enslaved people in Angola as ‘contract workers’ for São Tomé, creating stern competition to employers of the same labour in Angola. (Show less)

This paper uses a dataset of African children liberated from the transatlantic slave trade and resettled in the Colony of Sierra Leone, which details their assumed place of origin and age with qualitative archival material on their treatment in the colony. The dataset is an important tool in efforts to provide greater biographical understanding of these children’s childhoods after slavery by linking the early data with later narratives. Focusing on the idea of ‘recovering’ or ‘recapturing’ a childhood after enslavement, the paper tries to answer the following questions. How was the process of childhood recovery imagined or delivered in the Sierra Leone Colony? Can we identify specific ‘technologies of future-making’ (Shaw 2014) which underpinned the abolitionist resettlement programme? How did emancipated children interact with colonial authorities in seeking to achieve their desired future ‘after slavery’? The collected data highlight the tensions between utopian abolitionist visions of a world after slavery and the real-life struggles of displaced unaccompanied children. (Show less)