Maritime Flight in West Africa: Slavery, Networks of Belonging, and the Making of Free Communities in the River Systems of Colonial Sierra Leone
Myles Ali's project at Dumbarton Oaks explores slavery, commercial circuits, maritime flight, and the forging of free communities in the British colony of Sierra Leone. This research foregrounds the lives of maritime runaway slaves who deserted their masters on interior and coastal waterways to reclaim their freedom in the Sierra Leone Colony during the late nineteenth century. It draws on archival fugitive slave reports and other colonial/anti-slavery records to add new perspectives and vivid human detail to the histories of slavery, freedom, and community formation within colonial Africa, the Black Atlantic, and the global maritime African Diaspora.
Professional Biography
Myles Ali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. He is a historian of Africa, who focuses on the history of slavery, emancipation, trade, and colonialism in British Sierra Leone in West Africa. Myles received his PhD in History at York University, and he is a former University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow and recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, Captive Lives: Experiences of Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Sierra Leone.