New Publication by the Senegal Liberations Project

Congratulations to Joshua Goodwin, Erica Ivins, Richard Roberts and Rebecca Wall on the publication of their article!

The article "The Registers of Slave Liberation in Colonial Senegal: Preliminary Analysis of the Evidence from 1894 to 1903" is the result of their work on the Senegal Liberations Project. View the article here.

Abstract: This is a preliminary analysis of 10,000 enslaved Africans who obtained formal liberation in Senegal from 1894 to 1903. It is a subset of the 28,930 liberations recorded in the official Registers of Liberation from 1857 to 1903. Most of the evidence we have on liberated Africans are from those on ships that were captured by European anti-slavery squadrons on the high seas, and who were then liberated by the Europeans into various Vice-Admiralty courts and Mixed Commissions established to deal with such cases. Most of the enslaved Africans listed in the Senegal Registers of Liberation actively sought their own liberation; a smaller percentage were freed from captured slave caravans. The data used in this article comes from the twenty ledgers of the officially recorded liberations held by the National Archives of Senegal. This article provides a preliminary demographic characterization of this population of Africans and places these acts of formal liberation within a wider context of Senegalese political and economic history and French antislavery policies in Senegal.