Maeve Ryan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3792640 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maeve Ryan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maeve |
| FAMILY NAME | Ryan |
| SIGNATURE | RYAN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Digital Catapult |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2248-2891 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
British strategic defence reviews
Britain’s strategic defence and security reviews are regularly characterised as failures. This article presents original empirical data from UK policymakers and officials about how they account for this perception. Through extensive interviews and focus groups with key participants at every level of the review process, the authors identify seven key pathologies in British defence and security policymaking. Weak central direction, a disconnect bet…
Humanitarian Governance and the British Antislavery World System
How the suppression of the slave trade and the "disposal" of liberated Africans shaped the emergence of modern humanitarianism.
Grand-Strategic Thinking in History
Something that is recognizably and consciously “grand strategic” emerges in British political and foreign policy debates from the late nineteenth century onwards, but this chapter argues that certain grand-strategic assumptions were present even earlier in the century. A clearly identifiable British grand-strategic rationale—an understanding of the country’s “place in the world”—emerged out of the Napoleonic Wars and developed across the middle d…
It Was Necessary to Do Something With Those Women’
The colonial archive offers comparatively few glimpses of the individual lives of enslaved African women and girls brought to Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century and ‘liberated’ under the terms of the British Abolition Act of 1807. This article sets out to do four things: first, to consider what colonial sources reveal about how women and girls experienced and responded to becoming ‘liberated Africans’, and to the ‘disposal’ practices of the L…
Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896
Interrogates the development of the world's first international courts of humanitarian justice and the subsequent "liberation" of nearly two hundred thousand Africans in the nineteenth century
Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896
A moral millstone
Between 1808 and 1848, under the terms of the Abolition Act, thousands of liberated Africans were distributed as apprentices to private citizens in the colony of Sierra Leone. In 1847, Governor Fergusson described apprenticeship, by that date primarily of children, as ‘a moral millstone round the necks’ of the colony's population. The Liberated African Department in particular was singled out by many contemporary European critics as unable or unw…
"A "Very Extensive System of Peculation and Jobbing
After the Abolition Act of 1807, over 100,000 Africans were liberated at Sierra Leone, and “disposed of” by the Liberated African Department. For over half a century, this department was integrated deeply into the fabric of colonial life. In 1848, a “most extensive and searching investigation” was launched into allegations of corruption and embezzlement. This article seeks to evaluate how the 1848 enquiry can inform our understanding of humanitar…
“A Most Promising Field for Future Usefulness”
With the coming into force of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Sierra Leone1 assumed a substantially different role within the British Empire. No longer "simply a small struggling collection of unwanted black vagrants and intractable, independent-minded Nova Scotians and Maroons", the settlement once known as Granville Sharp's "Province of Freedom" became in 1808 a Crown colony, the base of operations for the Royal Navy's West Africa…
The price of legitimacy in humanitarian intervention
It rarely if ever happens that a foreign gov[ernmen]t gives up its selfish interests, its passions or its prejudices to the force of argument or persuasion; and the more such a gov[ernmen]t is in the wrong, the more pig headed it generally is, because its being very much in the wrong is a proof that it is deaf and blind to reason and right. Persuasion seldom succeeds unless there is compulsion of some sort, nearer or further off behind it. Lord P…
A moral millstone
Between 1808 and 1848, under the terms of the Abolition Act, thousands of liberated Africans were distributed as apprentices to private citizens in the colony of Sierra Leone. In 1847, Governor Fergusson described apprenticeship, by that date primarily of children, as ‘a moral millstone round the necks’ of the colony's population. The Liberated African Department in particular was singled out by many contemporary European critics as unable or unw…
The price of legitimacy in humanitarian intervention
It rarely if ever happens that a foreign gov[ernmen]t gives up its selfish interests, its passions or its prejudices to the force of argument or persuasion; and the more such a gov[ernmen]t is in the wrong, the more pig headed it generally is, because its being very much in the wrong is a proof that it is deaf and blind to reason and right. Persuasion seldom succeeds unless there is compulsion of some sort, nearer or further off behind it. Lord P…
“A Most Promising Field for Future Usefulness”
With the coming into force of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Sierra Leone1 assumed a substantially different role within the British Empire. No longer "simply a small struggling collection of unwanted black vagrants and intractable, independent-minded Nova Scotians and Maroons", the settlement once known as Granville Sharp's "Province of Freedom" became in 1808 a Crown colony, the base of operations for the Royal Navy's West Africa…
A moral millstone
Between 1808 and 1848, under the terms of the Abolition Act, thousands of liberated Africans were distributed as apprentices to private citizens in the colony of Sierra Leone. In 1847, Governor Fergusson described apprenticeship, by that date primarily of children, as ‘a moral millstone round the necks’ of the colony's population. The Liberated African Department in particular was singled out by many contemporary European critics as unable or unw…
"A "Very Extensive System of Peculation and Jobbing
After the Abolition Act of 1807, over 100,000 Africans were liberated at Sierra Leone, and “disposed of” by the Liberated African Department. For over half a century, this department was integrated deeply into the fabric of colonial life. In 1848, a “most extensive and searching investigation” was launched into allegations of corruption and embezzlement. This article seeks to evaluate how the 1848 enquiry can inform our understanding of humanitar…
Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896
Interrogates the development of the world's first international courts of humanitarian justice and the subsequent "liberation" of nearly two hundred thousand Africans in the nineteenth century
Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896
Grand-Strategic Thinking in History
Something that is recognizably and consciously “grand strategic” emerges in British political and foreign policy debates from the late nineteenth century onwards, but this chapter argues that certain grand-strategic assumptions were present even earlier in the century. A clearly identifiable British grand-strategic rationale—an understanding of the country’s “place in the world”—emerged out of the Napoleonic Wars and developed across the middle d…
It Was Necessary to Do Something With Those Women’
The colonial archive offers comparatively few glimpses of the individual lives of enslaved African women and girls brought to Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century and ‘liberated’ under the terms of the British Abolition Act of 1807. This article sets out to do four things: first, to consider what colonial sources reveal about how women and girls experienced and responded to becoming ‘liberated Africans’, and to the ‘disposal’ practices of the L…
Humanitarian Governance and the British Antislavery World System
How the suppression of the slave trade and the "disposal" of liberated Africans shaped the emergence of modern humanitarianism.
British strategic defence reviews
Britain’s strategic defence and security reviews are regularly characterised as failures. This article presents original empirical data from UK policymakers and officials about how they account for this perception. Through extensive interviews and focus groups with key participants at every level of the review process, the authors identify seven key pathologies in British defence and security policymaking. Weak central direction, a disconnect bet…
Colonialism, slavery, and trade (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · History (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Law (5 works) · African history and culture studies (4 works) · Corporate governance (4 works) · Ethnology (4 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (4 works) · Management (4 works)