ABSTRACT
Previous scholarship on the mixed-court effort to suppress the illegal slave trade in Suriname after 1807 has argued that the acquiescence of colonial officials to government venality was inevitable in the face of a powerful system whose political might and sociological reach subsumed individuality. This inevitability was also fostered by the hierarchy and colonial careerism that inclined officials towards quiescence and even collusion. The activities of English-born Christopher Edward Lefroy (1785–1856), however, raise a potential challenge to these contentions. In his professional capacity as British Commissary Judge in Paramaribo, he confronted both the Dutch government and British metropolitan authorities about their unofficial tolerance of the enduring illegal slave trade. His protests rebuffed, Lefroy resorted to publishing the novel Outalissi (1826), a sensational exposé of the connivance of British and Dutch officials with the local planter class in sustaining the contraband traffick in humans. This chapter closely examines Lefroy’s life to determine whether he was in fact a hypocrite who benefited from illegal trafficking, or a naïve idealist. A close examination of Lefroy’s public and private personas allows us to draw new conclusions about the nature and efficacy of Britain’s ban against international smuggling in forced migrants.
