Liberia and the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century: Convergence and Effects

Abstract

William C. Burke, an African American emigrant in Liberia, wrote the following to an acquaintance in the United States on 23 September 1861: This must be the severest affliction that have visited the people of the United States and must be a sorce [sic] of great inconvenience and suffering and although we are separated from the seane [sic] by the Atlantic yet we feel sadly the effects of it in this country. The Steavens not coming out as usual was a great disappointment and loss to many in this country.Burke's lamentation about the impact of the American Civil War on the distant Atlantic shores of Africa underscores a problem—and opportunity—in Liberian historiography. Burke's nineteenth-century world extended past the distinct national boundaries that separated the United States and Liberia. Geographically, this was the vast littoral of the four continents—Africa, Europe, North America, and South America—abutting the Atlantic Ocean. But the Atlantic world, as historians now dubbed this sprawling transnational zone, was much more extensive. Societies near and faraway were also drawn into the web of socioeconomic activities in the basin. The creation of the Atlantic world spanned almost four centuries, from the late fifteenth to the waning decades of the nineteenth century. In this period, an unprecedented multitude of migrants crisscrossed the Atlantic creating a vast network. For example, by the nineteenth century, regular transatlantic packages such as the Mary Caroline Stevens whose delay Burke called “a great disappointment,” transported passengers, provisions, and dispatches between the United States and Liberia.

Aspirational architecture and AK‐47s: Fragmented violence in Liberia from settlement to the contemporary

“…The violent conflict that plagued Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone from roughly 1989 to 2003 might therefore be easily viewed as evidence of the dramatic failure of a utopic vision for Africa's first republic. Often reduced to the dichotomous tension between arriving settlers and Indigenous Liberians, this violence has eclipsed longer and more complex trajectories of Liberian history (see Burrowes, 2016), including how diasporic settlers undertook the colonizing process at sites of settlement and how those processes affected relationships with Indigenous Liberians (Allen, 2010).…”

A State of Underdevelopment: Sovereignty, Nation-Building and Labor in Liberia 1898–1961

“…They brought with them the legal knowledge and zeal for freedom that allowed them to write a revolutionary constitution for the newly founded Republic that abolished slavery, restricted ownership of property to Africans and their descendants, and enshrined the economic rights of women. 5 But these progressive policies for settlers and their families contrasted sharply with the repressive and often violent rule enforced on pre-existing communities. Relations had been fraught since the establishment of the first settlement where, during negotiations over land at Cape Mesurado in 1821, US Navy officer Lieutenant Robert F. Stockton held a gun to the head of Dei leader King Peter.…”

“…24 These plantations were staffed mainly by the recaptive apprentices or laborers employed from surrounding areas. 25 The success of these crops, the high prices they attained on the world market, and the cheapness of labor allowed Americo-Liberians to invest in their towns, as well as in the material trappings of success. 26 But the commercial riches of the colonists attracted the attention of outside observers.…”

The rise and fall of sterling in Liberia, 1847–1943

“…TNA, T1/11612, Foreign Office to Colonial Office, 24 Jan. 1914. For more on the Kru, see Allen, ‘Liberia’, p. 24; Brooks, Kru mariner , pp. 5–7.…”