By Dr Lamin Manneh, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow (Faculty of History).
This post is part of Exploring Legacies of Enslavement: a research series, highlighting ongoing research on the legacies of enslavement.
19th-century map of West Africa. Public domain (Alexander Keith Johnston & A. H. Keane, 1878).
From 2026-2028 I will be working on a research project at the History Faculty titled Quantifying Freedom: Data production and everyday life in the Liberated African Village, 1807-1901.
Historical context: Liberated Africans and colonial settlements
Following the British ban on the traffic in enslaved Africans in 1807, British naval squadrons intercepted slave ships headed to the Americas and resettled rescued African men, women and children to newly established colonial settlements across the Atlantic world. In West Africa, the British resettled approximately 99,000 “Liberated Africans” in Sierra Leone and close to 4,000 in The Gambia.
What this group of people shared was the experience of enslavement and release; however, they hailed from diverse regional, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities.
Colonial governance and the rise of data collection
British imperial policy saw most Liberated Africans resettled into purpose-built, English-styled villages under the authority of state-appointed village managers. British and German managers recruited from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the Methodist Missionary Society (MMS) were tasked with educating, reforming, controlling, and surveilling newly emancipated Africans. Over time, European managers were replaced with Liberated African Christian leaders.
Crucially, village managers were charged with the production of vast quantities of data about life in the Liberated African village. This included data regarding church and school attendance, marriages, births, deaths, crop production, livestock, and more.
Investigating imperial data practices
Quantifying Freedom investigates how British imperialists mobilized data about Liberated African life to argue for the expansion of the British empire in West Africa at the expense of Liberated African freedom.
The project is therefore both a description of the aims of imperial data collection in the Liberated African village and a provocation: what freedoms are lost in the process of quantifying freedom? This project seeks to answer this question through a historical ethnography of data production and life in the Liberated African villages of Sierra Leone and The Gambia from 1807 to 1901. British abolitionists conceived of emancipation and freedom for Africans as a gradual process that would result in the formation of English-speaking, Christian, capitalist, and loyalist black subjects. Abolitionist policies introduced in the colonies of Sierra Leone and The Gambia were premised on these principles, leaving little room for different forms of expression, religion, social and economic practices, and ways of being.
Colonial officials designed metrics to prove to metropolitan politicians and white publics that the loss of revenue from the abolition of the slave trade could be regained through the productive, free labour of West African peasants capable of “civilization”. Data became the bridge between British abolitionist goals and colonial interests to the detriment of Liberated Africans’ ability to define their own freedom.
Excerpt from a Liberated African Department register documenting individuals liberated from the schooner Josefina at Sierra Leone, 1828. Image courtesy of the British National Archives via the Slave Voyages Project.
Aims and significance of the research
The main objective of Quantifying Freedom is to formulate an account for the impact of turning the everyday lives of Liberated Africans into numbers on ideas of race within the British Empire, on histories and techniques of British data collection and strategies of colonial governance and social reform in West Africa and beyond.
The project not only archives the troubled history of data and blackness in West Africa but also seeks to show Liberated Africans as practitioners of science in their role as collectors and analysers of data.
In positioning Liberated Africans as data collectors and interpreters, the project challenges narratives that position them solely as subjects of imperial knowledge, instead revealing their active participation in the production of modern bureaucratic and scientific practices.
About the author
Dr Lamin Manneh is a Gambian historian and Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow in the Faculty of History. His research focuses on urban and environmental history, British colonialism and the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade.
