Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2014
Description
The paper explains a methodology, where previously there was none, for identifying African and diasporan naval personnel hired by the British Royal Navy to serve in the West African Station in the mid-nineteenth century. The methodology employs a variety of naval documents including: ship's musters, description books, daily sick lists, and medical journals to identify African and diasporan personnel. The Royal Navy employed four categories (Kroomen, Liberated Africans, Africans, Blacks) to describe and to differentiate the African and diasporan work force within the Station. By identifying African and diasporan naval personnel more can be learned about the ways in which race and ethnicity were constructed and applied during the age of abolition. It also provides a method capable of examining the shipboard lives and socio-economic niches carved out by 'subject' people within the British maritime Atlantic World.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License
Citation Information
Rankin, John. 2014. Nineteenth-Century Royal Navy Sailors From Africa and the African Diaspora: Research Methodology. African Diaspora. Vol.6(2). 179-195. https://doi.org/10.1163/18725457-12341246 ISSN: 1872-5457
Copyright Statement
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/