Efforts to stem the slave trade in the nineteenth century resulted in the interception of slave ships in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the forced relocation of the Africans to a diverse range of settings, including the Cape Colony, Sierra Leone, Cuba, Brazil, Angola, the Gambia, and St. Helena, as well as various islands in the British Caribbean. Sierra Leone dealt with the largest number of arrivals, with approximately one hundred thousand Africans disembarked at Freetown between 1808 and 1863. The scale of operations was significantly different at two early sites of British slave trade suppression, as the number of “captured negroes” released at Freetown in 1812 exceeded the total of some 2,100 “prize negroes” diverted to the Cape between 1808 and 1816. The locations at which former slaves were disembarked had far-reaching implications for their subsequent experiences, as the capacity of an area to absorb and support these new arrivals was dependent on the geographical extent of territory, the quality of land available, the nature of the economy, and the number and origins of people already resident there. The experiences of Africans released were also influenced by whether they were relocated to a slave society or an area where slavery was of marginal importance in the social structure.

The Sierra Leone Peninsula was distinctive from the sites of later international courts at Rio de Janeiro and Havana, as attempts had been made by the abolitionist-inspired Sierra Leone Company from 1791 to define Freetown as an area free from slave trading and slave ownership. As an early experimental site for engineering a shift from slavery to free labor, the British Crown Colony of Sierra Leone established precedents for “disposal” after the arrival of “captured negroes,” which was the initial term used to refer to liberated Africans in Sierra Leone. These early resettlement practices were then imitated in various locations across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds in the early nineteenth century. A common feature of disposal systems was that they were typically based on an assumption that former slaves were not ready to enjoy “full freedom” and that any changes in status and labor arrangements should be gradual. This approach was also characteristic of the system of apprenticeship implemented following the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in the 1830s.