Dr. Christine Whyte

Recaptured Childhoods aims to uncover the experiences of emancipated children in locations across the Caribbean, Africa and the Indian Ocean. The research focuses on around 60,000 African children 'liberated' from the slave trade in the 19th century. These children experienced a wide variety of 'emancipations'. Some were indentured as labourers, others trained as servants, and a few educated as future anti-slavery activists. The project examines their experience of enslavement, which differed from adults in important ways. It will trace their journeys to coastal ports, forts and barracoons where they boarded slave ships, and reconstruct the experience of 'liberation' as far as the existing archival sources allow. Few children left accounts later in life, but for most there is no record of their lives after liberation and this project is also an effort to remember the lives of children caught up in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the significance of child exploitation after the legal abolition of slavery. This project builds on these insights about child labour after abolition, but shifts the focus from labour to dependency. In this, I drew inspiration from my collaboration with Who Cares? Scotland, an organization which support young people with experience of the care system. The British government unexpectedly found itself the guardian of tens of thousands of unaccompanied children, many of whom were in a very poor state of health, all of whom had suffered extreme trauma. How did colonial authorities, from Trinidad to the Seychelles, manage the treatment and care of these children? Did these efforts have an impact on institutional care for children elsewhere in the British Empire? How were ideas about childhood constituted through these interventions?

since 2018
Lecturer in Global History, University of Glasgow

2015–2018
Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, University of Kent

2013–2015
Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies

2009–2013
PhD in Global History, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich

2006–2007
MSc in Theory and History of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science

2000–2005
BA (Hons) in Humanities, Open University