Practicing Emancipation: Slave Ship Survivors, Atlantic Abolition, and the Everyday Politics of Freedom.

FAIN: FEL-282380-22

Laura Rosanne M. Adderley
Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, The (New Orleans, LA 70118-5698)

Completion of a book on slave ship survivors and the era of emancipation in the Anglophone Caribbean in the early nineteenth century.

I am applying to the NEH to support a year of full-time writing to complete a book about the labor and social experiences of several thousand free Africans taken from Atlantic slave ships by the British navy at the beginning of the 1800s. These people were the earliest Africans rescued during a six-decade international campaign against the slave trade. British colonial officials often looked to this population as a precursor for imagining what black lives might look like after slavery ended. Authorities collected voluminous data about these Africans and their experience as free laborers in Caribbean slave societies, especially in the pivotal years between British slave trade abolition in 1807 and emancipation in 1834. Using more than a thousand interviews—collective African witness to the process of ending slavery—"Practicing Emancipation" seeks to re-center everyday black experience in the history and contemporary understanding of race, labor, and the meaning of freedom.

Associated Products

Legal Encounters between Great Britain, Spain, and the United States in the Earliest Years of Atlantic Slave Trade Suppression (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Legal Encounters between Great Britain, Spain, and the United States in the Earliest Years of Atlantic Slave Trade Suppression
Author: Laura Rosanne Adderley
Abstract: Per final PPR: "The grant-funded year facilitated deeper exploration of the imperial and legal histories related to the rescue of these 5000 Africans in the earliest years after Great Britain passed a slave trade abolition law. Deeper forays into some of that legal history illuminated how many of these slave ship cases ended up focusing less on the abolition law itself and much more on trade disputes related to the Napoleonic Wars. Research presentations, in part illuminating the presence of Atlantic slave ships and thousands of Africans amid those diplomatic and legal histories took place at the Inaugural Congress for the Society of Global Nineteenth Century Studies (SGNCS) in Singapore in June 2023."
Date: 06/21/2023
Primary URL: https://www.sgncscongress.com/_files/ugd/c6f564_cd6b794547354446bf003a1c31c6360a.pdf
Primary URL Description: Conference program.
Conference Name: Congress for the Society of Global Nineteenth Century Studies

First Aftermaths of the 1807 British Abolition Law (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: First Aftermaths of the 1807 British Abolition Law
Author: Laura Rosanne Adderley
Abstract: Per final PPR: “As a scholar of Black experience during the years of British campaigning against the Atlantic slave trade and racial slavery, this is a scholarly community with whom I have research connections but had never until 2023 been able to attend or present at an NACBS conference.”
Date: 11/10/2023
Primary URL: https://www.nacbs.org/_files/ugd/d127be_0664cd4ec66a457d99ea31225a62a0b2.pdf
Primary URL Description: Conference program.
Conference Name: North American Conference on British Studies

Black Caribbean Humanity in the Fraught Archives of British Slave Trade Abolition: Finding African Kinship and Social Ties in Vice-Admiralty Courts and Customs Houses of the Early 1800s Caribbean (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Black Caribbean Humanity in the Fraught Archives of British Slave Trade Abolition: Finding African Kinship and Social Ties in Vice-Admiralty Courts and Customs Houses of the Early 1800s Caribbean
Author: Laura Rosanne Adderley
Abstract: Per final PPR: “Presentations on elements of what will now be the new Introduction and Chapter One of the book manuscript took place in June of 2023 at the annual meeting of the Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH) in San Juan Puerto Rico.”
Date: 06/01/2023
Primary URL: https://associationofcaribbeanhistorians.org/2023-papers/
Primary URL Description: Conference paper list.
Conference Name: Association of Caribbean Historians

‘Countrymarks on the Forehead’: African Faces and African Freedom in the Archives of Nineteenth-Century Slavery (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: ‘Countrymarks on the Forehead’: African Faces and African Freedom in the Archives of Nineteenth-Century Slavery
Abstract: Per final PPR: “This offered a significant opportunity to connect my Caribbean-based Atlantic slave trade history, with an institution and public community engaged with African American and slave trade history in a similar period in the nineteenth century. Mobile is the site of the museum dedicated to last-known illegal Atlantic slave trading venture that brought captive Africans to the United States. This museum invited me to share my story on similarly situated Africans taken from Atlantic slave ships in the British colonized Caribbean.”
Author: Laura Rosanne Adderley
Date: 02/21/2024
Location: Museum of Mobile
Primary URL: https://www.historymuseumofmobile.com/uploads/FORIMMEDIATERELEASE-TheFebruaryLearningLunchProgramattheHistoryMuseumofMobilewillfeatureDr.LauraRosanneAdderleyAssociateProfessorofHistoryatTulaneUniversity.pdf
Primary URL Description: Press release.

(De)Marginalizing French Slave Ships & their African Captives in the Era of Slave Trade Suppression: Case Studies from the Caribbean, 1807-1825 (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: (De)Marginalizing French Slave Ships & their African Captives in the Era of Slave Trade Suppression: Case Studies from the Caribbean, 1807-1825
Author: Laura Rosanne Adderley
Abstract: Per final PPR: “The 2024 presentations related to the transformation of the book project from 2023 included a paper at the Omohundro Institute for Early American Studies Annual Conference held in Poitiers, France with a specific aim to increase transnational dialogue in all study of the Americas in the 1500s through the 1800s.”
Date: 06/20/2024
Primary URL: https://oieahc.wm.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024_OI_Annual_Conference_Program_FINAL-copy.pdf
Primary URL Description: Conference program.
Conference Name: Omohundro Institute for Early American Studies

Navigations of Marriage and Family Formation Amid the Politics of British Abolition in the Caribbean (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Navigations of Marriage and Family Formation Amid the Politics of British Abolition in the Caribbean
Author: Laura Rosanne Adderley
Abstract: Per final PPR: “This presentation was conceived as contributing to the development of the new version of Chapter Two of the book on Reputed Family Relations.”
Date: 07/04/2024
Conference Name: International Conference Women and Slavery in Africa and America: a Comparative Approach

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