Outsourcing African Labor

By the late eighteenth century, the ever-increasing British need for local labour in West Africa based on malarial, climatic, and manpower concerns led to a willingness of the British and Kru (West African labourers from Liberia) to experiment with free wage labour contracts. The Kru's familiarity with European trade on the Kru Coast (modern Liberia) from at least the sixteenth century played a fundamental role in their decision to expand their wage earning opportunities under contract with the British. The establishment of Freetown in 1792 enabled the Kru to engage in systematized work for British merchants, ship captains, and naval officers. Kru workers increased their migration to Freetown establishing what appears to be their first permanent labouring community beyond their homeland on the Kru Coast. Their community in Freetown known as Krutown provided a readily available labour pool and ensured their regular employment on board British commercial ships and Royal Navy vessels circumnavigating the Atlantic and beyond. In the process, the Kru established a network of Krutowns and community settlements in many Atlantic ports including Cape Coast, Fernando Po, Ascension Island, Cape of Good Hope, and in the British Caribbean in Demerara and Port of Spain.

Outsourcing African Labour in the Nineteenth Century: Kru Migratory Workers in Global Ports, Estates and Battlefields structures the fragmented history of Kru workers into a coherent global framework. The migration of Kru workers in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, in commercial and military contexts represents a movement of free wage labour that transformed the Kru Coast into a homeland that nurtured diasporas and staffed a vast network of workplaces. As the Kru formed permanent and transient working communities around the Atlantic and in the British Caribbean, they underwent several phases of social, political, and economic innovation, which ultimately overcame a decline in employment in their