The Paradox of Protection: The Making of Indirect Rule in Southern Sierra Leone, 1850-1915

by Trina Leah Hogg

Overview

The Paradox of Protection: The Making of Indirect Rule in Southern Sierra Leone, 1850-1915 charts the history of protection to tell a new story about indirect rule in West Africa. Protection emerged as one of the central concepts through which Africans and Britons negotiated over law and economy in decades spanning informal and formal rule. Hogg shows how British protection schemes, an assemblage of written and unwritten legal strategies to safeguard British subjects and trade routes, created an unexpected legacy of insecurity by limiting and criminalizing traditional security measures. Tracing the history of the politics of protection reveals how African leaders who sought British alliances in their own long-standing disputes became increasingly vulnerable to physical and juridical violence. In the Protectorate, new forums like chieftaincy elections and criminal courts—common features of indirect rule—became spaces for Africans to assert claims to land and construct legitimacy. This book reveals how long-standing negotiations over protection shaped an unstable framework of colonial law and rule well into the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611865486
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2025
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Trina Leah Hogg is an assistant professor of history at Oregon State University with expertise in in the history of law and colonialism in West Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research was supported by New York University and the Center for the Humanities at OSU. Hogg has received several awards for research and teaching and was selected for the Wallace Johnson First Book Program of the American Society for Legal History.

Editorial Reviews

Trina Hogg makes a major historiographical intervention by showing that land and labor mattered considerably more to political decision-making for nineteenth-century leaders in Sierra Leone than scholars have shown. In lucid writing, she convincingly details how protection emerged as a driving concern that shaped the contours of rule of law, even before the formal implementation of indirect British rule. The book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand West African history, debates about the legitimate commerce, and rule of law in African history.”—Emily Burrill, author of States of Marriage

“What did it mean to live under protection when conflict abounded? How did Sierra Leonean peoples experience subject colonized status and challenge imperial authority? Trina Hogg offers a striking historical narrative centering the real lived experience of coastal Africans. Richly archival and testimonial, The Paradox of Protection cuts an exciting new path through received wisdoms about indirect rule and British colonization.”—Benjamin N. Lawrance, author of Amistad’s Orphans

“This rich and remarkable history of politics and law in the Sherbro region of Sierra Leone reveals a central paradox of British imperial expansion: that of African leaders who sought protection to secure their own positions but found themselves disempowered by their ‘protectors.’ It makes an important contribution to the history of colonialism in Africa.”—Michael Lobban, professor of legal history, University of Oxford, author of Imperial Incarceration


“This rich and remarkable history of politics and law in the Sherbro region of Sierra Leone reveals a central paradox of British imperial expansion: that of African leaders who sought protection to secure their own positions but found themselves disempowered by their ‘protectors.’ It makes an important contribution to the history of colonialism in Africa.”—Michael Lobban, professor of legal history, University of Oxford, author of Imperial Incarceration

“Trina Hogg makes a major historiographical intervention by showing that land and labor mattered considerably more to political decision-making for nineteenth-century leaders in Sierra Leone than scholars have shown. In lucid writing, she convincingly details how protection emerged as a driving concern that shaped the contours of rule of law, even before the formal implementation of indirect British rule. The book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand West African history, debates about the legitimate commerce, and rule of law in African history.”—Emily Burrill, author of States of Marriage

“What did it mean to live under protection when conflict abounded? How did Sierra Leonean peoples experience subject colonized status and challenge imperial authority? Trina Hogg offers a striking historical narrative centering the real lived experience of coastal Africans. Richly archival and testimonial, The Paradox of Protection cuts an exciting new path through received wisdoms about indirect rule and British colonization.”—Benjamin N. Lawrance, author of Amistad’s Orphans

From the Publisher