Herrmann on Black Loyalist Food Laws in Sierra Leone

Here's an article from 2016 that we missed and that is now available Open Access for six months: Rachel Hermann, "Rebellion or riot?: black Loyalist food laws in Sierra Leone," Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Volume 37 (2016): 680-703. The article bears noting for a few reasons. For one, it recently won the Belasco Prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. For another, Professor Hermann (Cardiff University) wrote a really useful post on The Junto describing the process of writing it and reflecting on how one turns a dissertation chapter into an article. Here's the abstract:

In 1800 black Loyalists in Sierra Leone participated in an event that historians have called a rebellion. Reinterpreting the 1800 rebellion as a food riot reveals more extensive black Loyalist political activity in the 1790s, greater cooperation between black Loyalists and white councilmen, and increased animosity between black Loyalists and Africans. Black Loyalists created food legislation with the approval of the Sierra Leone Council, but those laws fostered disagreements with Africans. When the Sierra Leone Council revoked the black Loyalists’ law-making abilities, colonists rioted to reclaim the political and legal rights that they developed through their food legislation.

Read on here.