History of Liberia

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History of Liberia
1856 map of Liberia
Early history
Colonial period
Americo-Liberian rule
Modern era
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Republic of Liberia
Subdivisions

Liberia is a country in West Africa founded by free people of color from the United States. The emigration of African Americans, both freeborn and recently emancipated, was funded and organized by the American Colonization Society (ACS). The mortality rate of these settlers was the highest among settlements reported with modern recordkeeping.[1][2] Of the 4,571 emigrants who arrived in Liberia between 1820 and 1843, only 1,819 survived (39.8%).[3][4]

In 1846, the first black governor of Liberia, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, requested the Liberian legislature to declare independence, but in a manner that would allow them to maintain contacts with the ACS. The legislature called for a referendum, in which Liberians chose independence. On July 26, 1847, a group of eleven signatories declared Liberia an independent nation. The ACS as well as several northern state governments and local colonization chapters continued to provide money and emigrants as late as the 1870s.[5] The United States government declined to act upon requests from the ACS to make Liberia an American colony or to establish a formal protectorate over Liberia, but it did exercise a "moral protectorate" over Liberia, intervening when threats manifested towards Liberian territorial expansion or sovereignty. Upon Liberian independence, Roberts was elected as the first president of Liberia.[6]

Liberia retained its independence throughout the Scramble for Africa by European colonial powers during the late 19th century, while remaining in the American sphere of influence. President William Howard Taft made American support to Liberia a priority of his foreign policy. From the 1920s, the economy focused on exploitation of natural resources. The rubber industry, specifically the Firestone Company, dominated the economy. Until 1980, Liberia was controlled politically by descendants of the original African-American settlers, known collectively as Americo-Liberians, who made up a small minority of the population. The violent overthrow of the Americo-Liberian regime that year led to two civil wars that devastated the country, the first from 1989 to 1997 and the second from 1999 to 2003.

  1. ^ McDaniel, Antonio (November 1992). "Extreme mortality in nineteenth-century Africa: the case of Liberian immigrants". Demography. 29 (4): 581–594. doi:10.2307/2061853. JSTOR 2061853. PMID 1483543. S2CID 46953564.
  2. ^ McDaniel, Antonio (April 1995). Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: The Mortality Cost of Colonizing Liberia in the Nineteenth Century. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226557243.
  3. ^ Shick, Tom W. (January 1971). "A quantitative analysis of Liberian colonization from 1820 to 1843 with special reference to mortality". The Journal of African History. 12 (1): 45–59. doi:10.1017/S0021853700000062. PMID 11632218. S2CID 31153316.[permanent dead link‍]
  4. ^ Shick, Tom W. (1980). Behold the promised land: a history of Afro-American settler society in nineteenth-century Liberia. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9780801823091.
  5. ^ Exhibit: The African-American Mosaic Archived February 26, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, 1994, Library of Congress
  6. ^ Huberich, Charles Henry (1947). The political and legislative history of Liberia. New York: Central Book Company. pp. 231–233. Archived from the original on August 19, 2020. Retrieved August 19, 2020.