discusses his brand new book 'The Bonds of Freedom' at Heffers Bookshop

The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade (Yale, 2025) tells the forgotten story of people seized from slave ships by maritime patrols, “liberated,” then forced into bonded labour between 1807 and 1880. Using extensive archival research from Sierra Leone, South Africa, Brazil, Cuba, the United Kingdom, and the United States, historian Jake Subryan Richards uncovers the contrasting ideas and practices of authoritarianism and freedom that empires and liberated Africans developed during the protracted end of the illegal slave trade.

Jake Subryan Richards is a historian of the Atlantic world and global history. He is assistant professor of international history at the London School of Economics. A BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker, Richards has presented his research on TheEssay, Free Thinking, and In Our Time. He has also written for History Today. An advocate of public history, Richards regularly works with schools, museums, and charities. He cocurated the exhibition Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance, at the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Jake will be joined in conversation by Professor Nicholas Guyatt of the University of Cambridge.

Date: Wednesday 22^nd October
Time: 18:00.

Full details and free tickets available at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-bonds-of-freedom-jake-subryan-richards-at-heffers-bookshop-tickets-1581339030609