This book explores the relationship between the slave trade, agricultural production, and colonialism over the first half of the nineteenth century in southern Sierra Leone. Although it was located on the frontier of Freetown, the base from which British naval and colonial officials attempted to suppress African slave exports and promote free labour, southern Sierra Leone was violently integrated into the world that the slave trade made during its final 'illegal' phase. The book reveals how these contrasting forces one rooted in slave trading, the other in the conjoined projects of abolition and colonialism collided along the southern Sierra Leone coast and profoundly affected the lives of free and enslaved Africans throughout the region.
