ABSTRACT
Between the 1807 abolition of the British slave trade and the 1833 emancipation legislation, captive Africans seized by the British navy from illegally operating transatlantic slave ships would be enlisted into the armed forces or indentured for a maximum of fourteen years. During this period, a set of Abolition laws were also passed in the Caribbean to prohibit the intercolonial movement of enslaved peoples. In 1821, a Royal Commission was sent to the region to investigate the ‘state’ and ‘condition’ of the ‘recaptured’ or ‘liberated’ Africans and Creoles who had been seized under these Acts. This chapter examines the archival remains of the Commission’s inquiry in Antigua in order to recover some of the individual stories of the diverse subjects who found themselves ‘condemned’ under the abolition laws. It pays particular attention to the testimonies of the indentured men and women who appeared before the Commission and who often protested the terms of their labor. The multivocal nature of the archive provides a rich portrait of the emergent tensions and contradictions within slave society in the final decades prior to emancipation.
