Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Name: Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Author: Hannah Durkin
ISBN: 9780008446550

Hannah Durkin

award won

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Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Hannah Durkin

award won

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Survivors won the Wolfson History Prize 2025. In the final decades of the Atlantic slave trade, hundreds of Africans were rescued from slave ships and taken to colonies across the British Empire. Yet their stories have been almost entirely forgotten. Most histories of slavery focus on those who endured the Middle Passage or were enslaved for life on plantations. The rescued Africans occupy an ambiguous middle ground: they were no longer enslaved, but nor were they truly free. Drawing on original research in archives across four continents, Hannah Durkin reconstructs the lives of these extraordinary individuals. From a Yoruba man who became a respected missionary in Sierra Leone, to an Igbo woman who fought for her freedom in a British courtroom, to young people who were apprenticed to British families and thrust into completely foreign worlds, these survivors' experiences reveal the complex legacies of abolition and the fraught nature of freedom itself. Their stories illuminate a crucial but largely hidden chapter of history and challenge everything we thought we knew about the end of slavery and the fight for human freedom.

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