Liberian Literary Magazine
Book Review
Reviewed by: Christine
Whyte
The past year
has
seen
an
embarrassment of
riches for those
interested in the
history of slavery
and abolition. The
complexity
of
connections
between
the
British
Empire
and anti-slavery
have come to the
fore-front, while
in the US the
cinema releases of
Lincoln
and
Django
Unchained have launched a new
popular interest in the legacies of
North American slavery and
abolition.(1) A new volume on the
origins of international law in the
abolition of the slave trade
highlighted
the
transnational
nature
not
only
of
the
humanitarian movements, but also
of government activity and proslavery lobbying.(2) The history of
the abolition movement has
benefited fro m the ‘new imperial
history’ approach, which takes
empire and colony in a ‘single
analytical field’, first proposed in
1951 by George Balandier, but
elucidated and popularised in
recent years by Catherine Hall,
Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick
Cooper, among others. These ‘new
imperial histories’ have intersected
with some of the preoccupations of
identity politics, producing interest
in how ideas about race, class and
gender were constructed in
empires.
The publication of Abolition and
Empire, which takes a comparative
approach to the colonisation
schemes of the 19th–century
British and American abolition
movements, is therefore timely,
and this detailed archival study fits
February Issue 0215
well into this landscape. The broad
topic of the study, anti-slavery
colonisation, is not a new one but,
as Bronwen Everill argues, the
entanglements and competition
between Liberia and
Sierra Leone have
gone
almost
unmentioned
–
despite
their
geographical
and
political proximity.
Her main argument
for
re-examining
their 19th;–century
history together is
the importance of the
interaction between
the two settlements
as well as their
impact
on
metropolitan
politics.
Neither
settlement
fits
comfortably into the traditional
imperial conceptual framework:
Sierra Leone ‘has frequently been
treated as an anomaly’, while
Liberia ‘is generally rejected
outright’ (p. 7). These fascinating
questions: why these colonies have
been left out of imperialist
narratives and how (or indeed, if)
they fit into the story of empire are,
necessarily, glossed over in one
page. Further study of these
theoretical questions would add
greatly to our understanding of the
role
of
the
‘humanitarian
interventions’ like these colonies in
African history.
The main research questions of
the study reflect the interest of the
past two decades in reworking
imperial history to demonstrate the
impact of the colony on metropole
(p. 8).(3) Everill’s questions add
complexity and nuance to the idea
of a monolithic anti-slavery
movement, asking how Sierra
Leone and Liberia served to
fracture consensus and intensify
competition amongst anti-slavery
networks. These questions are
served well by the comparative
approach, which emphasises the
interaction between the colonies.
28
The second approach explicitly
laid out in the introduction is
Frederick Cooper’s suggestion to
use processes of ‘identification’,
rather than the more flat and wornout concept of identity, to explain
how the settlers shaped their
respective colonies.(4) More detail
on this section would have been
appreciated – since Cooper and
Brubaker’s article first came out,
academics have tiptoed around the
minefield of identity, but more
precision is needed about what
‘processes of identification’ means
and how it substantially differs
from simply analysing identity.
In terms of source material,
students and researchers of West
African colonisation will find
much useful guidance. The book is
based on the author’s PhD thesis,
with some minor changes to the
content
and
structure. The
bibliography reflects her empirical
approach, and while the secondary
literature list may seem less
weighty than comparable volumes,
the four-country archival range and
extensive use of published primary
material more than compensate.
Her archival work took advantage
of the wide range of resources
available in American archives on
Liberia, to balance the sad lack of
archival material in Liberia itself
following the civil war. Both local
newspapers and letter collections
are also used to give an idea of
settlers’ views. The wide range of
archives consulted reflects the
diversity of actors and contexts
touched on throughout the work,
which ranges freely from Freetown
to Washington, from Monrovia to
London and even as far as Texas.
The difficulty in this kind of wideranging approach lies in the danger
of obscuring or eliding elements of
resistance,
co-operation
and
interaction
between
different
groups within the settlements, and
Everill takes time to make it clear
that she focuses solely on those
who ‘do engage with the imperial
government’. This is particularly
pertinent in the case of Liberia,