Quantifying Freedom: Data production and everyday life in the Liberated African village, 1807-1901

Quantifying Freedom: Data production and everyday life in the Liberated African village, 1807-1901, is a historical ethnography of Liberated African villages in colonial Sierra Leone and the Gambia under British rule. Upon being returned to the coast, many Liberated Africans were settled in English-styled villages managed by the Church Missionary (CMS) and Methodist Missionary Societies (MMS), with oversight from the colonial Liberated African Department. These villages initially formed the basis of an abolitionist social experiment: to attempt to prove the relative productivity of free black labor over slave labor, the civilizational capacities of Africans and alternatives to the slave trade. To this end, these villages were simultaneously sites of data creation and extraction in which clergy village ‘managers’ collected data on everything from church attendance to livestock numbers. After an initial wave of British and German missionary managers, Liberated Africans took over these positions and innovated their own data collection processes that responded to their questions and concerns. This project proposes to study data-driven social reform, race, and the expansion of the British Empire in West Africa in the aftermath of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. The objective is to both understand and formulate an account for the impact of the quantification in the Liberated African village on ideas of race within the British Empire, on histories and techniques of British data collection and strategies of colonial governance and social reform in West Africa and Britain. The objectives in terms of training and career advancement is to improve the researchers capacity to produce high-impact publications, to acquire more experience in collaborating with others in teaching and designing courses, public outreach , improvement in the researchers quantitative skills through engagement with quantitatively focused research groups and training programs at Cambridge.