The Black Englishmen of Old Calabar
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5101770 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ndubueze L Mbah, Ndubueze Mbah (0000-0001-6060-7451) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 2022 |
| Issue | 144 |
| Pages | 45-75 |
| Publication date | 2022-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Radical History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-6545 • E-ISSN: 1534-1453 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/01636545-9847802 |
| OpenAlex | W4312930644 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 36 |
This article recovers the Afropolitan histories of Liberated Africans by examining their mobility and freedom politics. Liberated Africans enacted Afropolitanism when they returned from Sierra Leone to Old Calabar and fashioned themselves into Black Englishmen. Their Afropolitanism incorporated a dissident mode of Anglo-cosmopolitanism, thereby undermining orthodox British visions of imperial subjecthood. In using petitions to British authorities to assert their identity as British subjects, they secured their precarious freedom but challenged British monopoly of the Bight of Biafra's transatlantic palm oil trade. Rather than being mere recipients of abolition, Liberated Africans refashioned abolition. They used forged "freedom papers" to emancipate, repossess, and traffic slaves from Old Calabar society while defending their behavior as "redemption" of slaves. Contrary to imperial fixity of African subjects, Liberated Africans evinced an Afropolitan vision of belonging. They simultaneously claimed to be natives of Sierra Leone and Old Calabar. Their contradictory ideologies and practices mitigated their marginality and confounded African elites and British imperial agents
Ethnology · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sierra leone · Sociology · Vision · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law
Trade and politics in the Niger delta 1830-1885
Political Organization in Nigeria since the Late Stone Age
The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra
Trade without rulers
The Making of New World Slavery
Work and Community Among West African Migrant Workers since the Nineteenth Century
Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896
Memoirs of the late Captain Hugh Crow of Liverpool
Abolition in Sierra Leone
Freedom’s Debtors
Carriers of Culture
The Remedy
Touts and Despots
The Two Princes of Calabar
Politics and Society in South Eastern Nigeria, 1841-1906
Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History
A moral millstone
Atlantic Passages
A Saro Community in the Niger Delta, 1912-1984
Becoming African
More than Chattel
The Diaspora of Sierra Leone’s Liberated Africans
Reconstructing the Life Histories of Liberated Africans
Africa Remix
On Trans-Saharan Trails
From Sail to Steam
Four Sierra Leone Recaptives
Cosmopolitan Style
Efik Traders of Old Calabar
Old Calabar 1600-1891. The Impact of the International Economy upon a Traditional Society
Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |