Empire: World History - 63. Creating Sierra Leone: The Land of the Free

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

These former slaves have fought valiantly for the British and have been promised a new life. With things not working out in North America, eyes turn toward Africa. Could their homeland, from which they had been so brutally torn, offer sanctuary? Listen as William and Anita are again joined by Maya Jasanoff to talk about the attempts to create a colony in Sierra Leone. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durunpool. Now, we are with the very brilliant historian, Maya Jassanoff, and Maya, Maya, you're so interesting. We build this as the story of Sierra Leone, but we didn't really mention it at all in the last podcast. This has never happened before with us.

It's unknown in the empire world that this should happen. But look, we're going to get to it now because you introduced us to this rather extraordinary man, Peters, who is just basically sick and tired of bad promises and bad faith promises made to soldiers who fought like he did for the British side. So he decided at the end of the last episode you said to take his complaint to England. And this man, we should say for those who didn't hear the last episode, this was a black former slave who had joined British forces, fought with the black pioneers, fought very bravely, and then found that the promises that had been made had not been fully honored after the end of the war. So who does he talk to in London? I mean, do we have abolitionists in London at this time who would be sympathetic to the complaints of a former? slave. We do. So Thomas Peters has presented a bunch of petitions in Canada, deaf ears, and he decides to go straight to London. And one of the people that he can hook up with in London is Granville Sharp.

Granville Sharp is one of the small coterie of abolitionists who has organized, you know, various things to end the slave trade, but also a scheme which is called the Committee for the Relief of the Black poor. And this. This group is interested in helping out the different black loyalists who have ended up on the streets of London begging often because they have no means of support at all once they've come to the UK. And basically freed slaves who find themselves destitute. Yeah, and one of those people, I mean, we've sort of heard that I'm so excited because we talked about Equiano who gets co-opted in this. Also, the most famous freed black slave in London who. is writing the narratives that they're finally getting people to sit up and take notice of slavery. Equiana, it becomes involved how?

Well, so this committee, you know, committees often have schemes and whether those schemes work out or not as a completely different matter. So this group and Equiana was involved decided that they wanted to try to help out these guys by sending them to set up a new colony. And that colony was going to be in West Africa on the coast of modern-day Sierra Leone. So these unfortunates get sent off under the sponsorship of this committee and they go to Sierra Leone where they have just the most disastrous experience. Yeah, they really do. So just to make this a bit clearer, this happened before Peters even gets to London. There's one failed attempt by Granville Sharp that occurs before the Black soldiers from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick go. And in that original failed attempt, they have a really hideous time. I mean, it's awful. Some of them are held in horrible disease-ridden waiting camps, then put on

disease-ridden boats. The loss of life, the mortality rate, is truly terrible in this supposed trip to freedom. It's just terrible. The conditions are awful. And, you know, let's not forget that some of these individuals had been captured themselves, right, and endured the middle passage. I mean, I cannot imagine what it was like for these people to have, embarked on these ships again. Not only, of course, from America's back to Britain, but then from Britain to Africa, they end up there. These presumably are not actually slave ships there. They're not the same sort of stacked sort of pigeonholes as a slave ship. No, they're not, but let's just say they're not very nice. Yeah. They're not a luxury liner. And also PTSD-inducing. I mean, as you say,

am I? There's dark. It's on the sea. It represents everything that they have feared and loathed in their paths. Absolutely. And the thing is that, you know, this is a period, what are, what are ships like? I mean, ships are awful. The conditions for naval ratings, you know, naval personnel are terrible on ships. Ships are being used as prison hulks at this time, right? They're being used to transport convicts to Botany Bay. They're being used, obviously, in the slave trade. So, you know, they don't have the clothing, they don't have decent food. You know, they're dying on board before the ships even get underway, as you mentioned, Anita. And so anyway, they finally get going. Do they have any internal organization? Have the slaves got together and formed committees of any

sort? Is there any hierarchy? Well, they're free. Let's just say these are free men, right? But they're also, by the way, another thing. So guess what? I mean, the place they're being sent in Africa, right? Sierra Leone is adjacent to, number one, a penal. colony that the British are trying to set up. Number two, one of the biggest slave trading posts in the region. Gosh, they've got the, probably, you know, some of them would have been taken from areas around there. That's not very comforting, is it? I mean, you've got, quite possibly, you know. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And what guarantees are that the slavers won't just recapture them and ship them off back to the south? None. The only thing is sort of, you know, some kind of British

government support and division and a feeling like, okay, look, you guys are over here and those guys are over there and, you know, all about that. But anyway, so they go there, they arrive there in 1787. Do we have any first-hand accounts? Is anyone who was involved in these voyages written a memoir? Definitely some of the white people. I don't, I honestly don't remember if we have. So they arrive in 1787. I mean, they're not arriving in a vacuum one supposes. So they're arriving in this place. So they've been sponsored by this, you know, charitable committee. They're sent off. And they arrive. And they arrive. And they arrive. and they arrive, as I say, like basically between a slave trading post on the one side,

between, of course, indigenous sovereigns on the other, right? Who, what do they think about people moving in? You know, the British have concocted treaties with them, but the treaties are of the nature of such kinds of treaties. They're often, you know, poorly understood on both sides and done in, you know, bad faith and all the rest of it. And the long and short of it is that in pretty short order, these guys who have been sent off to set up this, you know, idealistic community with a list of

instructions for how to govern themselves from Granville Sharp, you know, find themselves on the ground beset by disease, adverse weather, climate, and the pressures of the slave traders, the indigenous rulers, et cetera, on all sides. Okay. So, but they, I mean, they are, so I love this character, King Tom, who is, negotiating with the British saying, you know what, you send me your unwanted blacks. And you know, there was a huge effort to repatriate because people in Britain, you have the abolitionists who think there's a duty of care, but you have a lot of British society saying, you know,

these black soldiers who've come back to Britain, we don't want them. We don't want them. So there is a huge push to send them back to Africa. King Tom is in charge, I guess, of a certain tract of land and negotiates with the British to say. King Tom, we should say it is an indiginal. a sovereign, and King Tom is the nickname that the British give him. And he promises the British he'll look after them, he'll protect them from the slaves, is that right? Yes, that's right. Yeah, but he's not there for long enough to make a difference, because tell us about King Jimmy.

Well, so here's the thing. I mean, you know, there's different hierarchies of rule, and of course the British don't understand this at all, and so they are making a deal with King Tom, but actually King Tom has a superior, who's called Nambana. And Nambana is the person that they really ought to deal with because he has the authority to make the deal. And he says, OK, I'll give you safety and whatever, for which they give him in return, embroidered clothes and a telescope.

Two hefty wheels of cheese. Yes, wheels of cheese and a mock diamond ring, et cetera. In any event. And rum. Lots of rub. Lots of rum. lots of tobacco, lots of guns. These are standard commodities

and these sorts of negotiations. Anyway, they make the deal with him, but then there's another deputy, King Jim or Jimmy, who is doing deals with the slavers over on the island and the harbor, right? So King Jimmy then, you know, says, well, I have an incentive

to, you know, deal with those guys, the slave traders. And so, you know, he's paid off by them and he ends up rating the settlements and it all just, falls apart. It's just a disaster. And the settlement, I mean, the settlement is named after Granville Sharp, who has this great vision of creating this free town or free land in Sierra Leone. It's called Granville, the place that they settle in. When the man himself gets to hear about King Jimmy's treachery, if you like, and that these people who've gone in good faith who are living

in a place named after him, what does, what does Granville Sharp have to say about this? Well, he's definitely pretty devastated by the whole thing. I mean, he, you know, Granville Sharp is a fascinating character who, shall we say, is visionary in certain respects, but is also a little bit impractical. His idea for how these people are going to govern themselves is modeled on his... Where is he physically at this point? He's in London. Granville Sharp is always in the UK. So he never comes here? No. And he sketches all these things out on the basis of a sort of Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism and so on, you know. So it's all pretty nutty. But yeah, what he is, he may be nutty in some ways, but he is also a man with a vision, right? And he's committed to it. And so he's devastated to learn about the ruins of this place. But he's also not giving up on the idea of it.

And it's at this point that through the seredipity of migrations around the British imperial world, Thomas Peters lands up in London. and Granville Sharp gets to know about him and about the plight of the black loyalists in Canada and thinks, aha, these are the people who we need to send in a re-up of the project of the province of freedom in Africa. So this first attempt at creating a colony in Sierra Leone called Granville Town has failed and failed spectacularly. Let's talk about Peters now because he's in London and he's planning to pick up the people from Nova

and New Brunswick who aren't happy, and actually a company has been created to run this venture. 1791 is the year. The Sierra Leone Company is started, and the directors, the directors are a really interesting bunch. So on the one hand, you've got the abolitionist Granville Sharp, who is completely devastated that his first experiment hasn't worked out, Granville, this great plan of his. But the other two names, now they're the ones that are really going to stand out to British listeners. You've got William Wilberforce. you've got Thomas Clarkson, two giants of the abolitionist movement. So, Maya, I mean, what are they doing? Is this a charitable company there to help people, or is it a money-making thing like the East India

company, which they hope you can invest in and has a share price and so on? Well, interestingly, it's a little bit of a fusion, and here's how it works. So the folks who had been involved in the society for the affecting of the abolition of the slave trade, who include many of the people that you just mentioned, are moved by this idea that if you can show that there's a way to make profits from African labor in West Africa without the slave trade, then you don't need the slave trade anymore. And they want to try to open up channels of free commerce, by which they mean, you know, free labor, that will essentially drive the slavers out of business by being more profitable. So they're a company in the sense that they have this idea that they're going to

foster free labor and mercantile exchange, but they're also doing it on the basis of an emphatically abolitionist agenda, which is to say that really black people should be free and work in conditions of freedom and Africa can be profitable in this way. So this whole project is a remarkable example of, I suppose, what we could call a public-private partnership or something like that, which is that you have the sort of charitable impulse that had moved this committee for the black poor, which was a disaster, now segueing into the Sierra Leone Company, joining hands with the British government in the following way. Basically, the British government says, okay, we'll provide the passage and we'll kind of help these first settlers in your scheme get set up.

And then you guys provide the land on the ground and, you know, kind of keep track of what's happening on the ground. So you've got you've got good people who mean well, who are trying to do a good thing. You've got Thomas Peters who's trying to best represent the people, black fighters like himself who've served the British and he's represented them. And they have land identified and they have a company to run it. I'm so wanting to say, and they all lived happily ever after, but that's not how the story goes. Is it, Maya? What happens? Well, it's never quite so simple, is it? I mean, the feelings and the motives are, as you say,

quite positive, optimistic, benign. And there's some lovely material that we have that it describes the way that the black settlers went to Sierra Leone now with the vision that they were going to set up a town, not called Granville Town after an individual, but called Free Town after the principle that they were going for. The person who's a person who's going to, deputed from the Sierra Leone Company end to kind of lead this whole thing is none other than Thomas Clarkson's brother, John. And John Clarkson goes to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, personally, to talk to... At the age of 27, young guy. And he had fought in the Navy during the Revolutionary War. And he goes personally to basically go from, it'll end up being sort of

house to house, and congregation to congregation, to explain. to the black community what it is that they're trying to set up. And he persuades them. And there are these, as I say, amazing accounts that we have both by some of the black loyalists and in Clarkson's own diary of how he meets these communities and persuades them. So they all get on the ships, they sail across. And as you say, we want it to be happily ever after. And this should be kind of Moses leading his people to the promised land, but it doesn't work out like that. Well, and indeed, let me just add, one of the preachers involved in this is called Moses. And he's known as Daddy Moses by his congregation.

He's a Methodist preacher. He's blind. Is there a movie on this? This is all got a. They really should be. I mean, it's a, no, it's very moving and it's very stirring. And the power of faith, I think, in however sense you want to spin that, faith in the ideals, faith in God, faith in a better future, you know, is really very profound. profound and animating. So but, but, but, the but, let's get to the but, what, what goes wrong

with all of this? And about 1,200 take up the offer. That's the sort of figure, isn't it? A third of the entire black community of lowlands. Yes, exactly. Okay, so they show up in Sierra Leone, they meet under a tree, they basically found the city of Freetown, which exists down to this day. As the capital of Sierra Leone. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. But, you know, they face, some of the same challenges that the previous population had faced. They faced the climate, they face the weather, they face the slave traders on the one side and the indigenous rulers on the other side. One important detail we didn't have about the slave traders. The slave traders apparently have a two-hole golf course. So this weird situation where you have these sort of rum

drinking horrible traders sitting there with their mistresses and their two-hole golf course. And then you've got these poor guys and their hearts landing in this Godforsaken. area. Is this a swamp? What are they actually landing on? Is it good land? You've been there, haven't you? I have, yeah. So Freetown is on a huge natural harbor. It's one of the largest in that region, which is why it became an important British naval base on commercial port. And it's surrounded by mountains. And in fact, it was the shape of the mountains that gave the region its name when the Portuguese sailors first passed it in the 16th century. And it looked to them like the curve of a line, back, hence.

Sierra Leone, yeah. Sierra, which is the mountain and Leone. Yeah. So, no, but it's, so it's, there's a lot of sort of hills and ravines and then a, and then, of course, a harbor. And in the rain, what that means and it's, you know, the rainy season comes. And it means that the, that the, that the water just rushes down the ravines. It turns the soil into clay.

And, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a challenging terrain to start an agricultural colony. Sure. I mean, and, and if I were. one of these people who's already sort of been landed on the stony cold soil of, you know, say, Nova Scotia, and then I'm transported to a swamp where everything I plant gets washed away, I'm not going to be happy. So does that unhappiness result again in complaints? Because remember, these are the same kinds of people who were not content with what they've been given. So they petitioned in London for something better. They know how to fight their cases. Do they do it again?

Yeah. So some of our same community leaders who had been active in Canada are active in Sierra Leone. So Thomas Peters, who had gone with Clarkson to Canada to try to recruit people for this scheme, ends up in Freetown. And with one of his colleagues, who's very important called David George, who's a preacher, he gets one of the first lots in the town. It's nine acres, which is pretty good. Most of the others get less, like six, four, two, et cetera. But, Over time, they just find that they're marginalized, that they don't get the kind of respect from the British authorities that they want. And Peters, you know, true to his temperament and his commitments, ends up still petitioning the governors of this case, John Clarkson, for better treatment of better rights. I mean, he's a protein shop steward and a very effective shop steward for his union, isn't he? How does Clarkson take it? I mean, some people may react well, and some people may say, well, you're so ungrateful. Look at all we've done for you. How does he take it? So Clarkson, I have to say, I find Clarkson as these people go, a pretty sympathetic figure historically,

because I think John Clarkson truly wants to kind of do the right thing by the people that he's now kind of found himself in charge of in conditions that he hasn't been able to choose. But he doesn't find a way to kind of make it work. And frankly, he ends up basically calling in sick. You know, he has a lot of health trouble, in fact, throughout the period in Canada and beyond. And he basically finds that, you know, in 1791, 1792, when they're there, that he basically, you know, is ill and he can't deal with it. And, you know, he tries to summon the community to a meeting where he placates them. He assembles them. There's this huge tree in downtown Freetown to this day called, it's a cotton tree.

And it's seen as the kind of meeting point for the community. Silk cotton trees in this world are almost mystical things, aren't they? There are lots of legends in the Caribbean about silk cotton trees being like a portal that take you back to Africa and where the magicians meet. and they spin at night and take off. They're tied up with indigenous religion very heavily. He assembles them under this tree and he has a, you know, a whole meeting with them to try to get them to, you know, to back down. He says, look, if we divide, then this whole settlement is going to fall apart.

And he does manage to kind of cobble out some sort of peace. But at the same time, he's also really just kind of shattered. And he ends up leaving Freetown not that much later because he can't really take it anymore. And this is going to be a problem for the settlers because no one is going to end up being as good as Clarkson in charge of them in future. And there is trouble on the horizon, trouble in the shape of the French. Join us after the break and find out what happens to the newly minted Freetown. Welcome back. We are speaking to the excellent Maya Jassanoff about their founding.

foundation of Freitown and Sierra Leone, this dream vision of abolitionists to send freed slaves to show the world how Africa can be productive for everybody, including the empire, and they have no reason to hold on to this notion of slavery if they can make this dream experiment work. The experiment is hard work. A man called Clarkson has just left, leaving this settlement very exposed. And then tell us who arrives, Maya. Well, I want to say that the first people who arrive are new governors. So John Clarkson had been a good governor, relatively speaking, in the sense that he tried his best to accommodate the demands of the black settlers, including demands about the allocation of land and promises about how they would be given it, notably that they would not be taxed on it in an important way, not have to pay quick rent specifically. He's replaced, when he sails back to England, basically exhausted, honestly.

he's replaced by first a kind of evangelical officer called William Dawes who comes to Freetown from Botney Bay, where he had been in charge of the convicts. Dawes doesn't stay for too long, but then also unpropiciously comes the next governor, a fellow by the name of Zachary McCauley. Now, this name might be familiar to British listeners. It is indeed, but not a Zachary McCauley. There's a different McCauley. we talk about. The Macaulay that you talk about is the son of Zachary McCauley. You talk about Thomas McCauley.

Thomas McCauley is, of course, the incredibly prominent Victorian historian associated with liberalism and the weak idea of history and all the rest of it. Thomas McCauley, though, is the son of very prominent evangelicals, part of what's called the Clapham sect with William Wilberforce, part of this abolitionist movement. Charles Grant, what are the the big directors of the East India Company who's trying to impose evangelical Christianity on India at the same time? Yes. And Zachary McCauley, the father of Thomas, has an imperial history of his own, which has included work in Jamaica for a few years before he is in London and then gets, you know, has his family and so on. Zachary McCauley is appointed to be the

governor of Sierra Leone. And he sails out to Freetown taking office in 1792. Now, Zachary McCauley, again, known for his commitment to abolitionism, but also known for a rather severe kind of evangelical faith that accompanies it. Very sort of austere, inflexible, people describe him as... Which is actually very much par for the course with the abolitionism. Is that not true? A lot of them are these very extreme evangelicals. And the idea that you have to be free to take on God is one of the major motives, which you don't. get in the movie version or in many of the school textbook versions of abolitionists? Yeah, I mean, there's something quite puritanical about it. And, you know, they're very, you know, suffice to say, the things that we associate with a kind of all of the, all of the

civilizing mission in the more pernicious sense of the liberal vision, which Thomas McGaulay will be so involved in, have this evangelical belief at their core, that the individual is responsible for his own lot and uplift and life. And salvation. And salvation. So anyway, here's Zachary McCauley. He's in charge. He comes in 1792, at which point the geopolitical situation of the colony is transformed. Because it is in 1792 that a new revolution makes itself felt in the British imperial world. And that is that of France, which under the Jacobins declares war on Britain and opens up what is going to be a generation-long war around the world trying to determine, again, what the future essentially of the imperial world is going to look like.

Is it going to be the Jacobin revolutionary and later Napoleonic autocratic imperial vision? Or is it going to be this British empire that is getting sort of consolidated around some of these premises of sort of kind of freedom, you know, kind of free trade, evangelicalism, motivating it, kind of maybe abolitionism, et cetera. Okay. So he, I mean, he has his feet under the table for about a couple of years when the French arrive. So this, this is, now the French arrive, they're doing what the French do, chipping away the British Empire and trying to extend their own. What do they do? What do they do to Sierra Leone? So Zachary McCauley sees these sails in the harbor.

He thinks they're British because they're flying British flags, but it turns out their decoy flags and they're French. And the French immediately start bombarding the city of Freetown. This is such a tragic story. These guys have just set themselves up. They've just escaped. I give them a break, honestly. Yeah.

And, you know, they have finally managed to build stuff, right? I mean, you know, the muscle power involved and just building things in this area has been enormous. So they're, you know, the office. the dwellings, the storehouses, the church, Anglican church. All of this is, you know, blown up by the French and the Canaanade. And then the French land and they come plundering through the town. They, you know, smash the printing press. They grab the hogs and the chickens and they make off with them. They steal the clothes. They, you know, they basically just plunderable.

These are these are French revolutionaries who are screwing up the lives of these freed slaves. Well, yes, but of course they're screwing up the lives of British subjects, right? It's what they see. Anyway, they plunder and then they leave, right? They're not going to stick around. This is just a kind of smash and grab. It's a hit and run. Let's hurt them and run.

But this is at this point that McCauley loses the constituency because it doesn't he get all of the blacks in Freetown to swear an oath of allegiance before he'll have the medically treated in this terrible cannonade. Doesn't that happen? And that makes him as hated as some of the people who ran their lives before. And many of these people have been not killed by the French because they swore that they were not British, that they were Americans. Yeah. So there's a puzzling little sleight of hands that McCauley does. He says, guys, you want to plunder this place. But you know what? These people are actually not British. They're American. And so therefore, and we're neutral.

And so we ought to be, you know, left free, you know, from all of your plunder, et cetera. We're actually neutral. The French don't buy it. But also, the black settlers are pretty upset because they say, wait, what are you doing now telling us that we're not English? We were British subjects for 20 years before we came to Sierra Leone. We gave everything up. And, you know, in the Americas, I mean, obviously they ran from slavery in various, you know, cases. But, you know, we took an oath of allegiance.

We followed the British. We did all of these things. We were loyal to you. How dare you tell us that we are not British subjects? And it is at this moment that this amazing sort of fissure opens up that is at once a kind of replay of the American Revolution. And on the other hand, a kind of new direction, I think, for anti-colonialism in the British Empire. Well, you know what you're describing there as the perfect recipe for an uprising? So the French have gone, you've got a fisher, you've got bubbling resentment.

Everyone hates McCauley. Everyone hates McCauley. They're writing these very poignant letters back to John Clarkson in London saying, you know, one of them is like, Times is not as it was when you left us. You know, it's really, they're having a hard time, you know. And so what do they do? Well, they do what British subjects do, which is that they write petitions to protest. And they do that.

And then what do the British governors do? Well, they do what they learned to do in the American colonies, which of course didn't work there very well, which is that they reject the petitions. And so all of this ends up basically blowing up. And it blows up around a matter of taxation. We've heard this story before, Meyer. Yes.

It's all very familiar. Yeah, Clarkson had told them you do not have to pay rent on your land. There will not be fees. But now McCauley ends up passing a thing saying, no, you've got to pay fees on the land. And the loyalist, black loyalist settlers of Sierra Leone, Freetown just have had enough. And they end up breaking away, essentially launching a coup. They issue their own legal code. They elect their own leader, who's one of the people who had been an emissary back to London at a certain point to try to get better treatment.

Isaac Anderson. Is that his name? Yes, that's his name. And they try to get support from our old friend King Tom, who's still in the area. He's still in the mix. Right. Yeah. And so there's all of this kind of negotiating on the ground, which is, you know, in a way, it's what has made it so difficult to govern this place before. But it also sort of opens up different sorts of possibilities. And so they try to kind of create this alliance on the ground in order to break away from the rather ruthless authoritarianism of Zachary McCauley. Okay. And then they all live happily ever after, Maya.

No. Your face is saying, no. Okay, so then what happens? Because, I mean, the British don't like uprisings. Historically, they don't approve of these things. No, not a good way to adhere yourself to the admiralty. No. And there are some in London who will say, this is what happens.

When you grant Black's freedom, this is what will happen. To many, it will prove the argument that these are not. people who can be trusted to be loyal to us. Yeah. And, you know, it above all underlines the message that the British took from the American Revolution, which was, you know what, give them an inch, they're going to take a mile. And we better not do that. We better instead say, okay, look, you can be free to practice your religion, you can do this, you can do that. That's fine, but you have to be loyal to the king and you have to abide by our rule. And that is what they take from the American Revolution, and it is consolidated when they're faced by the Jacobins,

you know, this completely radical movement. And it is with this spirit in mind that once the loyalists and so on, they start their new, you know, coup, their alternate government, etc., Zachary McCauley is having none of it. And cracks down, you know, brings in the troops, hunts them down, routes the rebels. Extraordinary detail, the, they're helped by Maroons from Jamaica. same people that put down Tacky's revolt when the slaves rose up in Jamaica are brought in over the seas from Jamaica to crush this lot. Exactly. And, you know, in a final irony, I will tell you about one individual who's caught up in all of this mix, who's a fellow who had run from

a plantation in the Dunmore years, had fought, had been evacuated from New York, had ended up in Canada, had moved to Freetown, got his land, ended up being dissatisfied. joining the rebellion. What is this fellow's name? Washington. Harry Washington. He had been a slave owned by George Washington in pre-revolutionary America. He ends up making his way all the way to Sierra Leone. And in the rebellion, he will find himself banished from the colony because of his involvement in the rebellion by the British authorities. Is this tortured American textbooks or not? No, I'm guessing you're shaking your head not. Can I just ask, the maroons are so problematic.

They were problematic, as William said in Jamaica. They are now crushing a town that's trying to be free with free black slaves running their own lives. Why are they doing this? Why? Empires are systems of coercion. And you have to find a way to work. within the coercion in order to get anything that you might want. And the Maroons, just to explain for those who may not have heard the Tackies Revolt

episode, are themselves runaway slaves who headed for the Highlands in Jamaica, created their own lives, and having fought the British, are allowed to remain free if they come to the aid of the British when they need them. When they're called. I mean, it's the same question. The reason I ask, it is the question that will be occurring to people listening. And it's the same question we get when we talked or we got when we talked about India and the East India Company. Why did so many Indians fight for the East India Company?

It's, I mean, you're saying it's because it's the only way to survive. You make the deals you can, you know. And what we see in so many of these cases are people who are fighting for something in one scenario, we'll find a way to get part of what they want, and it means making compromises and others and so on. And this is a through line. And it's how you operate in a coercive system where you don't have power. It's a very heartbreaking end of both stories, this story and the Takers Revolt, that the people who crush it are themselves freed slaves. It's just horrible imperial irony and the fact that the British are using these people.

Well, I mean, again, you use what you've got. I mean, for Britain, it's so, you know, they have to keep a hold or the French will. And who knows? You know, I mean, you cannot see history. It's global history. Globalized history is so important. You have to see every piece. everybody's motivation. What happens, Maya, after the British crush this uprising, what happens to

Sierra Leone in Freetown? Well, you know, it's in a sense it's sort of the last gasp for the time being, at least, of a certain kind of agitation. The rebels are sent away and order is imposed and the maroons end up getting land in Freetown and join the population of formerly enslaved people who are living there. They must have been welcome neighbors. Well, you know, I don't. I can't fully speak to it because, you know, there are similarities between these populations, right? I mean, all of them have been dispossessed in various ways and end up in these circumstances.

So, but what the Maroons find is the same thing that the loyalist found, which is that guess what? not everything that they had hoped for is materialized. However, the picture really will change in a few years from this time because in 1807, the slave trade is abolished by Britain and by many other powers. And the Sierra Leone Company ends up getting dissolved. And Freetown from the sort of early 1800s is turned into a crown colony with a very different kind of government and so on. And so its trajectory begins to resemble more that of some other British colonies. And some of these kind of holdovers from the American Revolutionary era begin to kind of fade further into the background. Can I just ask in conclusion?

It's been just so marvelous. Again, we found ourselves doing two episodes instead of one with you. And thank you so much for being so patient and staying with us as long as you have. But what would you say the impact of this whole Sierra Leisure. own experience. What impact did it have on abolition in the end? Did it speed it up? Did it hold it back? Did it play no part at all? I'm minded to say that the thing that really made the difference was the experience of having so many three black subjects, more than the experience of where they actually went. Because I think it did confront the British with, in the short term, a kind of humanitarian crisis that they had to deal with, but in a broader sense, the fact of just, you know, having to figure out how to accommodate people and some sort of solution that worked in the British liberal imperial imagination.

The other line, though, that I would draw out of it is back to the United States. Because I think that the most significant consequence of Freetown, which did survive and did grow, partly because populations like the Maroons came. And then, guess who else came after 1807, whenever the Royal Navy took a slave ship and freed the captives on that, these so-called recaptives. After abolition of slave trade within the British Empire in 1807, yeah. They would be sent to Freetown. So, you know, it ends up becoming this kind of melting pot of, all of these formerly enslaved people. What that ends up doing is creating an example for Americans

for what will become the colony of Liberia, which is started by American abolitionists in the 1820s with a very coherent program of relocating freed slaves as an abolitionist experiment to West Africa with all kinds of complicated motives that you can unpack in another episode. But it does create some sort of template for what a free black colony or country can look like. And it is Liberia, which will end up being one of the only places in all of Africa that is not formally colonized by European powers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Maya Jasanoff, I can't tell you what a delight it has been. I mean, you've taken us, yeah, all over the world and through time. It's been amazing.

This is a story which has really been told very little before you wrote it in your remarkable book. And anyone who wants to know more just goes straight to Myers' remarkable Liberty's exile, which tells the story not just of these people, but of figures, white figures, like David Dr. Loney, you go off to India, all these other characters. And this is extraordinary loyalist diaspora, which should be written out of American historiography before you rescued them from the archives. And it's a much celebrated book that has won many, many prizes. I strongly recommend it. Also, Meyer is a wonderful prose stylist, and it is a delightful book to read.

So we hope to welcome you back, Meyer, for further episodes. Wonderful book called Conrad we're going to talk to you about soon, and I would love to talk to my favorites of all your books. Absolutely wonderful first book, which we're going to go back to Tipu and many of my favorite characters. So please come back on another time. Yeah, I mean, I don't know whether you see that as a blessing or a curse, Meyer, but you're not going anywhere. She's smiling very sweetly. They'll give her ideas. Then an invitation.

But we would love to have you back. Thank you so much. And just a reminder that as we're coming to the end of this series, we're going to be recording some special episodes very soon where we answer all of your questions. So if you have a question about this series that you want answered, just send them in to EmpirePod UK at gmail.com. That's EmpirePod UK, all one word, at Gmail.com. And until the next time on Empire, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan.

And goodbye from me, William Durember.