"Whose Loss?": Reparations, Indemnities, and Sovereignty During the Era of Slave Trade Abolition.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

My dissertation examines the disparities in indemnities - monetary compensation, territorial concessions and land redistribution, recognition of sovereignty, and legal protection - distributed by Britain to European powers and West African sovereigns for slave trade abolition compliance from 1807 to the mid-nineteenth century, and analyzes the moral and legal discourses surrounding redress and compensation for liberated African recaptives and sovereigns in West Africa. Britain made nearly two hundred anti-slave trade treaties during the era of slave trade abolition. The treaties, legal instruments used to codify indemnities, represent a significant body of legal activity that recalibrated the global order at the end of the slave trade. These agreements reflected and remade the global racial hierarchy of the nineteenth century and exacerbated the financial disparities between European and West African sovereigns and between liberated African recaptives and European nationals who received compensation from Britain for abolishing the slave trade. Previous scholarship analyzes indemnities and reparations given to Atlantic slave owners in the nineteenth century. This scholarship illuminates the lesser-known material circumstances and consequences of the slave trade suppression treaties that Britain signed with foreign powers, revealing how other non-victimized parties benefited financially from the end of the slave trade.