Freetown, Sierra Leone, was the earliest site of British colonial abolitionism on the West African coast. Founded in the late eighteenth century, the new city was imagined as a place of freedom in contrast to the slaving societies of the Atlantic. It was settled by an extraordinarily heterogenous mix of ex-enslaved people, though the last ‘Liberated African’ arrived in 1863 and imperial funding for the Liberated African Department shrunk close to nothing. Freetown Unstable is a history of the city after it had lost its reason to be.

Milo Gough examines the transformation of Freetown during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the colonial state attempted to reinvent the city. Making extensive use of maps, photographs and other visual archival material, he argues that Freetown was an unstable entity produced by the entanglements and frictions of a diverse array of urban agents, including itinerant African photographers, sickly colonial surveyors, malarial mosquitoes, caustic newspapermen and Freetonian missionaries. In describing this contested colonial urbanism, Freetown Unstable also reflects on some of the surprising ways in which coloniality is re-emerging in contemporary urban West Africa.