Chapter Twenty-five - Runaway Announcements and Narratives of the Enslaved

Summary

Readers of the eighteenth-century British press were perfectly aware of the presence in their island home of enslaved men and women of African, Indian and other ethnicities, just as they were perfectly aware of enslavement in the colonies and elsewhere around the world. It is, for example, possible to trace in British newspapers over seventy advertisements for the actual sale of men, women and children – and once even of a baby (with his mother). As well as general shipping news noting colonial commerce, commercial announcements are found relating to slave-trading, such as that informing ‘Gentlemen concerned in the Slave Trade’ of the closing of one firm in Grenada with the transfer of its business to another (Edinburgh Evening Courant, 29 June 1768). The court cases that challenged these practices of enslavement, most notably that of Somerset v. Stewart, also featured in the press (Cairns 2012b: 292, 296–7), as did meetings of the developing abolitionist movement (Edinburgh Evening Courant, 5 March 1792).

The presence in British newspapers of advertisements for runaway slaves has long been recognised. Thus, in a work first published in 1848, Sir Daniel Wilson referred to two examples in the Edinburgh newspapers (Wilson 1875: 290). After the Second World War, Little and Banton drew on them for historical aspects of their sociological studies (Little 1947: 168–70; Banton 1955: 22). Scholars have used these announcements of runaways and sales for insights into the situation of the black population in the United Kingdom in the Georgian era (Walvin 1986: 32, 36, 62–3; Gerzina 1995: 7; Chater 2009: 92–5). There have been attempts to draw on a more systematic collection of such announcements to explore aspects of the lives of enslaved Africans and Indians in Scotland (Cairns 2012b: 305–10; 2013: 156–9). To do so is now made easier by the website, ‘Runaway Slaves in Britain’, produced by a team at the University of Glasgow (‘Runaway Slaves in Britain’ 2018). Molineux has injected a note of caution about such collections, making the fair point that they are devoid of context (2020: 585); but this collection, a searchable database of 835 advertisements, provides a foundation for much of this chapter, which places them in a more general knowledge of eighteenth-century newspapers and their varied historical contexts.