Sex and Age in the Registers of Liberation from Colonial Senegal, 1857–1903: Sources, Scales, and Data
Richard Roberts (Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus, Stanford University) will present "Sex and Age in the Registers of Liberation from Colonial Senegal, 1857–1903: Sources, Scales, and Data."
Richard Roberts has published widely on the social, legal, and economic history of French West Africa. He has published and edited 14 books and special journal issues, and has authored over 50 articles. Together with Professor Rachel Jean-Baptiste, he is co-PI of the Senegal Liberations Project.
Sex and Age in the Registers of Liberation from Colonial Senegal, 1857–1903: Sources, Scales, and Data (Wallace Teska, Richard Roberts, and Kelly Duke Bryant)
Relying on Senegal's "Registers of Liberation," which, from 1857 to 1903, recorded names of 28,349 people who gained French recognition of their freedom from slavery, this article explores both the utility and limitations of quantitative approaches to the study of slavery, underscores the need for research on the circumstances under which our data were originally recorded, and asks how historians might use data to shed light on individuals’ lived experience. The article describes several earlier registries that might have shaped the types of information recorded for each entry in the Registers of Liberation in Senegal and explores what the categories used might have meant to the historical actors who created them. Its discussion of this context supports an argument about method: that historical data, and the biases and distortions embedded in its production, should drive the questions historians ask. The article also analyzes changes over time in the age and sex of newly liberated Africans to show how historians might unpack and contextualize data, and to offer glimpses into enslaved Senegambians’ diverse experiences of slavery, their strategies for liberation, and the knowledge of French procedures shared among them.
Wallace Teska is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge; Kelly Duke Bryan is Associate Professor of History at Rowan University; Richard Roberts is France and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus, Stanford University.
