No General Descriptions provided.
| Year Range | Freetown (si_freetown_1) was in: |
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"This was initially not a British colony. It was a self-governing entity called the Province of Freedom, equipped with an idealistic constitution drafted by Granville Sharp and with a government run by the settlers themselves." [1]
[1]: (Fyle and Foray 2006: xxxiii) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM.
"The beginning of modern Sierra Leone has often been identified with the founding of a settlement for manumitted Africans in Freetown on the Sierra Leone Peninsula in 1787. [...] Britain established formal colonial control of Freetown in 1808, a year following the enactment of the Abolition Act (1807) proscribing the Atlantic slave trade for British citizens." [1]
[1]: (Cole 2021) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/WBFJ8QU5/collection.
"Britain established formal colonial control of Freetown in 1808, a year following the enactment of the Abolition Act (1807) proscribing the Atlantic slave trade for British citizens." [1]
[1]: (Cole 2021) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/WBFJ8QU5/collection.
"In addition to the African Americans who were motivated by an ideological conviction of liberty to fight against their plantation owners in the American Revolutionary War, thereby earning the moniker of “Black Loyalists,” and the Maroons from Jamaica (via Nova Scotia), the settlement was comprised of a culturally diverse group of people whose ancestral origins can be traced to societies from the Senegambia Valley to central and southern Africa." [1]
[1]: (Cole 2021) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/WBFJ8QU5/collection.
"In addition to the African Americans who were motivated by an ideological conviction of liberty to fight against their plantation owners in the American Revolutionary War, thereby earning the moniker of “Black Loyalists,” and the Maroons from Jamaica (via Nova Scotia), the settlement was comprised of a culturally diverse group of people whose ancestral origins can be traced to societies from the Senegambia Valley to central and southern Africa." [1]
[1]: (Cole 2021) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/WBFJ8QU5/collection.
English was the "official" language, Krio developed as the lingua franca shared by the majority. " The communication pattern which emerged developed under the ‘supervision’ of the English authorities who insisted on their own values and language, which also quickly became the criteria for advancement. For those who could readily communicate with the colonial establishment, there was an increased chance of obtaining contracts and jobs as carpenters, masons, washer women, domestic servants and so on. These were the ‘plum’ jobs of the time in the early colony, carrying with them a consequent social prestige and status. For this reason therefore, English, and variants of it, which perforce developed among the Settlers and recaptives, became an ‘official’ means of contact. But most of the Settlers and recaptives had at best only a smattering of English, used when necessary. The Nova Scotians had elements of what became Black American English as spoken in the southern United States, mostly in the rural areas where the blacks were largely found. But the Nova Scotians were few to start with, as many of them died in an unfamiliar climate and environment. The individual languages of the recaptives, who comprised the vast majority, persisted but did not provide a means of inter-group communication. Against this background developed a language system [called Krio] using mostly English derived words, but having a syntax based almost entirely on the African languages from which it drew support (Fyle and Jones 1980)." [1]
[1]: (Fyle 1993: 45) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/34MHK5T2/collection.
English was the "official" language, Krio developed as the lingua franca shared by the majority. " The communication pattern which emerged developed under the ‘supervision’ of the English authorities who insisted on their own values and language, which also quickly became the criteria for advancement. For those who could readily communicate with the colonial establishment, there was an increased chance of obtaining contracts and jobs as carpenters, masons, washer women, domestic servants and so on. These were the ‘plum’ jobs of the time in the early colony, carrying with them a consequent social prestige and status. For this reason therefore, English, and variants of it, which perforce developed among the Settlers and recaptives, became an ‘official’ means of contact. But most of the Settlers and recaptives had at best only a smattering of English, used when necessary. The Nova Scotians had elements of what became Black American English as spoken in the southern United States, mostly in the rural areas where the blacks were largely found. But the Nova Scotians were few to start with, as many of them died in an unfamiliar climate and environment. The individual languages of the recaptives, who comprised the vast majority, persisted but did not provide a means of inter-group communication. Against this background developed a language system [called Krio] using mostly English derived words, but having a syntax based almost entirely on the African languages from which it drew support (Fyle and Jones 1980)." [1]
[1]: (Fyle 1993: 45) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/34MHK5T2/collection.
Inhabitants. Note that at this time this polity was largely coterminous with the settelement of Freetown. "From about 2000 in 1807, the Colony’s population grew rapidly due to the large influx of Recaptives there." [1]
[1]: (Alie 1990: 66) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/MGRDTDAE/collection.
in squared kilometers. Roughly, area of the Sierra Leone peninsula, calculated using Google Maps Area Calculator. "The beginning of modern Sierra Leone has often been identified with the founding of a settlement for manumitted Africans in Freetown on the Sierra Leone Peninsula in 1787." [1]
[1]: (Cole 2021) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/WBFJ8QU5/collection.
"Unlike other regions in West Africa, coastal Senegambia and Sierra Leone had no significant iron industry of their own and iron bars were the favoured indigenous and non-state controlled monetary medium, or ‘commodity’ currency, and given in exchange or as units or ‘measures’ of value. Like cowries elsewhere, the iron bars were durable, divisible and difficult to counterfeit and they were used for calculating the value of manufactured goods, tobacco, rum, firearms, cloth and other goods. By the nineteenth century the system had become a clumsy medium of exchange though. For example, for the purposes of book-keeping, Sierra Leone Company accounts were recorded in pounds, shillings and pence, whereas for the best part of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, goods and labour were locally valued in iron bars (or Spanish dollars)." [1]
[1]: (Mew 2016: 200) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/U3D2FQIH/collection.
The following quotes suggests that the main forms of "money" consisted of articles such as cloth, tokens such as iron bars, and foreign coins. "Indigenous currency systems emerged as well among groups such as the Kissi and Mende, in the form of locally made cloth, for example." [1] "[F]rom the turn of the century, to the ‘mosaic of currencies’, which included the Sierra Leone Company coinage and the iron bars system, could be added silver Spanish dollars, Mexican dollars, French five-franc pieces and Maria Theresa thalers as well as gold Spanish American doubloons (or ‘pieces of eight’), American five-dollar and French twenty-franc pieces. By the 1820s, however relatively small in amounts, the Spanish dollar had become the principal foreign currency across the coastal region." [2]
[1]: (Fyle and Foray 2006: xxxii) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM.
[2]: (Mew 2016: 199-201) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/U3D2FQIH/collection.
The following suggests that paper currency was first introduced in 1808. "From 1 January 1808 Freetown was administered by Whitehall and served as the residence of the British governor. The company coins were withdrawn with the transfer, with re-issues of only the ten-cent pieces in 1802, 1803 and 1805, by which date they had become extremely rare. The first governor specifically objected to the company currency because he believed its decimal denomination appealed to American republicanism. The company coins were immediately replaced with bills of ten, five and one dollars, and three months later with Governor Thompson’s own home-made treasury bills of five pounds and one pound sterling,38 whose issues spiralled out of control within two years of his appointment." [1]
[1]: (Mew 2016: 200) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/U3D2FQIH/collection.
" The chronic shortages of silver coins in Freetown then provided a very early opportunity for the directors of the Sierra Leone Company to commission their own new currency for the settlement. They argued in a despatch to the superintendent and Council for the Settlement (circa 1791) that the community required a more ‘exact’ and ‘portable’ medium of value that would contribute to increasing commercial transactions and improve the circulation of goods. Thedirectors recognised the powerful potential of territorial currencies in claiming that introducing a Sierra Leone Company money medium would help to promote their views of ‘commerce, cultivation and civilisation’. The specific designs on the coins (see below) were intended to spread their moral messages more widely as they circulated. In 1792 the Soho Mint of Birmingham received an order for one-dollar silver pieces and one-penny copper pieces. Eight hundred dollar pieces and 200,000 one-penny pieces were coined. The amount of one-penny pieces commissioned was ambitious though, considering that the colony’s population numbered just under 2,000 inhabitants and that the coins’ value was too high to be used in local market transactions. Within two months of the coins’ arrival in Freetown in 1793 a new order was placed for a token coinage of one dollar (100 cents), half a dollar (50 cents), 20 cents, tencent and one-cent pieces." [1]
[1]: (Mew 2016: 200) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/U3D2FQIH/collection.
"Because of their location the coastal towns of Sierra Leone acted as interfaces where international currencies could be found to circulate. After the abolition of the slave trade, Cuban and Brazilian traders struggled to obtain European manufactures for carrying out local exchange. To make their local payments along the west coast of Africa, they brought with them coins, silver dollars and then gold doubloons. Thus, from the turn of the century, to the ‘mosaic of currencies’, which included the Sierra Leone Company coinage and the iron bars system, could be added silver Spanish dollars, Mexican dollars, French five-franc pieces and Maria Theresa thalers as well as gold Spanish American doubloons (or ‘pieces of eight’), American five-dollar and French twenty-franc pieces. By the 1820s, however relatively small in amounts, the Spanish dollar had become the principal foreign currency across the coastal region." [1]
[1]: (Mew 2016: 199-201) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/U3D2FQIH/collection.