Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2018 -

This is an extraordinary, meticulous study of a single chapter in the early efforts of the British to suppress the legal slave trade. Christopher (Univ. of New South Whales) writes with nuance and an eye for human experience about the legal drama that played out along the coast of what are now Sierra Leone and Liberia, in other parts of the Atlantic World, and in Australia. relying on archives from all these places and drawing on ethnohistory, she documents the story of British and perhaps American slave traders as they faced an imperial navy suddenly bent on ending a longstanding practice. She also writes of people captured, held as slaves, and then declared free in a process as mystifying as their initial enslavement. The narrative gives equal weight to the actions and mental world of the formerly enslaved and to slave traders. Among the unconventional methods Christopher employs to achieve this balance are brief chapters that alternate between Africans in Freetown and Europeans on the coast of Africa, in England, and finally in Australia. She manages to trace the story far past these important moments, providing a welcome, if rare, sense of closure for the reader.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.