Published on Reviews in History (https://reviews.history.ac.uk ) Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia Review Number: 1385 Publish date: Thursday, 28 February, 2013 Author: Bronwen Everill ISBN: 978-1137028679 Date of Publication: 2012 Price: £55.00 Pages: 248pp. Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Publisher url: Place of Publication: Basingstoke Reviewer: Christine Whyte The past year has seen an embarrassment of riches for those interested in the history of slavery and abolition. The complexity of connections between the British Empire and anti-slavery have come to the fore-front, while in the US the cinema releases of Lincoln and Django Unchained have launched a new popular interest in the legacies of North American slavery and abolition.(1) A new volume on the origins of international law in the abolition of the slave trade highlighted the transnational nature not only of the humanitarian movements, but also of government activity and pro-slavery lobbying.(2) The history of the abolition movement has benefited from the ‘new imperial history’ approach, which takes empire and colony in a ‘single analytical field’, first proposed in 1951 by George Balandier, but elucidated and popularised in recent years by Catherine Hall, Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, among others. These ‘new imperial histories’ have intersected with some of the preoccupations of identity politics, producing interest in how ideas about race, class and gender were constructed in empires. The publication of Abolition and Empire, which takes a comparative approach to the colonisation schemes of the 19th–century British and American abolition movements, is therefore timely, and this detailed archival study fits well into this landscape. The broad topic of the study, anti-slavery colonisation, is not a new one but, as Bronwen Everill argues, the entanglements and competition between Liberia and Sierra Leone have gone almost unmentioned – despite their geographical and political proximity. Her main argument for re-examining their 19 th ; – century history together is the importance of the interaction between the two settlements as well as their impact on metropolitan politics. Neither settlement fits comfortably into the traditional imperial conceptual framework: Sierra Leone ‘has frequently been treated as an anomaly’, while Liberia ‘is generally rejected outright’ (p. 7). These fascinating questions: why these colonies have been left out of imperialist narratives and how (or indeed, if) they fit into the story of empire are, necessarily, glossed over in one page. Further study of these theoretical questions would add greatly to our understanding of the role of the ‘humanitarian interventions’ like these colonies in African history. The main research questions of the study reflect the interest of the past two decades in reworking imperial history to demonstrate the impact of the colony on metropole (p. 8).(3) Everill’s questions add complexity and nuance to the idea of a monolithic anti-slavery movement, asking how Sierra Leone and Liberia served to fracture consensus and intensify competition amongst anti-slavery networks. These questions are served