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Following parliament's abolition of the British Atlantic slave trade in 1807, thousands of slaves were rescued from slave ships and transformed into "liberated Africans." Britain's abolition of the slave trade sustained the belief that the British empire was a liberal one, which has been continuously celebrated in the recent nostalgic accounts of the British empire and its legacies. Henry Lovejoy and Richard Anderson's Liberated Africans challenges this rose-tinted view of British abolition. Through a close analysis of a wide range of primary sources from traditional and digital archives, the authors of the various contributions successfully trace the "human consequences for the supposed beneficiaries of this campaign…the immediate and complex human impact of abolition" from 1807 to 1896 (4). They thoroughly examine the lived experiences of liberated African men, women, and children in various colonial settings relating to the British, Spanish and Portuguese empire as well as Brazil and Liberia.
From the outset, the authors caution us that the term "liberated Africans" should not be taken for granted, "especially surrounding any implications associated with freedom" (3). The authors' remark draws the reader's attention to the central argument of the collection; that slave trade...