Scholars of transatlantic slavery use fugitive slave advertisements to piece together stories of resistance. This worthwhile pursuit is even more impressive in understudied sties like the European metropoles. Simon P. Newman's Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London unpacks slavery and bondage in seventeenth-century England through these popular newspaper documents. This research upends our understanding of how pro-slavery print culture like fugitive advertisements developed. Until now, these announcements were understood as an invention of the colonies, but Newman reveals that this newspaper practice was exported from Europe to the Atlantic colonies. The birth of the runaway slave advertisement in London “provides telling evidence of a much deeper and more direct English engagement in the construction of racial slavery than historians have appreciated” (xxvii). Freedom Seekers reveals a new precedent of the print technology, but also underlines the connections between London and the colonial projects of the Caribbean, Chesapeake, and New England in the early modern Atlantic world.
While scholars of the colonies and cultural exchange have successfully pushed against the one-way flow of information from Europe to “New World,” Newman reasserts that line and with good reason. His research positions fugitive slave advertisements as an English invention. The first advertisement unearthed dates from 1655 London and begins a data set of almost two hundred fugitive slave advertisements ending in 1704. This pre-dates printing in the colonies of Barbados, South Carolina, Jamaica, and Virginia, with their emerging slave economies. Until now, scholars working with fugitive slave advertisements had cited a 1704 advertisement in Boston as the first in the English, Atlantic world. This new set of British late seventeenth-century advertisements analysed in Freedom Seekers changes how we understand the development of print culture as a pro-slavery tool of recapture.
Newman's work on the Runaway Slaves in Britain online database picks up where this project ends, bringing to light 125 years of fugitive slave advertisements from the United Kingdom. Freedom Seekers remarkably builds on the database, enriching understandings of domestic slavery practices, and the demographics of the enslaved, like gender proportions, dress, ethnicity, and age. British slavery's unique practice of brass or silver slave collars was evidence by their mention in 15 per cent of the notices (117). The early moment of slavery read through these documents demonstrates that slavery in London was predominately male, and young, under nineteen years old. Enslaved or bound “servants” accompanied and laboured for a range of roles associated with the Atlantic trades, like captains, merchants, coffeehouses, and other colonial elites. Britain's domestic practice of slavery is complicated by unspecific racial, ethnic terms like “black” or “blackmoor” and the presence of South Asian servants in bondage alongside African-descended “negroes” (33–35). Some African people with filled teeth or pierced ears were likely born on the continent, freshly arrived via the Royal African Company or a related network. Others described with facial brands and ear or nose mutilation certainly spent some time in the colonies where these punishments quickly differentiated Africans enslaved in perpetuity from the white, temporarily indentured, labourers.
Freedom Seekers lays bare the way slavery adapted and existed alongside other forms of labour. Enslaved people in Britain worked alongside waged sailors, servants, and other surplus pools of workers, yet the demand for chattel slaves remained. My own primary site of temperate slavery studies, upper Canada, shares this facet with waged staff, subsistence or trade farming, slavery, and indenture. Understanding London's freedom seekers within an excess labour pool and varying labour schemes is something other temperate, northern, or slave-minority sites should consider. These studies of slavery show a coexistence with other types of work like waged labour, domestic servitude, indenture, gradual abolition, or the apprenticeship scheme in Jamaica. This diversity within slavery is important and drawn out beautifully by Freedom Seekers. Slavery studies has been fixated on the plantation complex and the associated “slave work” but London's seventeenth-century slavery complicates that narrative.
In addition to the precedent of pro-slavery print culture like fugitive slave advertisements, Newman highlights the connections between London and the developing colonies. From coffeehouses around the Royal Exchange to the bankers backing projects from the Chesapeake to the Caribbean and West Africa, colonial slavery was financed and communicated through London. Freedom Seekers finishes by tying the colonial connections firmly with Quakers like William Penn as early slave backers and the numerous North American merchants and contacts listed for slave capture. From London the racial servitude of slavery emanated, influencing colonial print culture and waves of legislation between 1690 and 1715 which differentiated enslaved African labour. These slave codes from Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina created separate laws for the “Negroes” of the colony, as they emerged as a separate inheritable and legal status (203–5). Part of these codes involved the reward for hunting fugitives, and eventually colonies used newspapers as part of the pursuit. Newman deliberately refers to these runaways as “freedom seekers,” positing to readers of colonial slavery that London needs to be credited with “creating a public discourse of slavery” through print (215).
Overall, Freedom Seekers is a smart, thoughtful, and fruitful contribution to British history, colonial slavery studies, and the topic of fugitive slave advertisements. Combined with the Runaway Slaves in Britain database, enthusiasts can gain a deeper understanding about northern, urban, slave-minority practices from the epicentre of the British Empire. Both projects are tremendous resources which would complement a variety of interests in European social or economic history, critical race theory, and slavery's emergence in the Americas. The narrative of Freedom Seekers is empathetically introduced through the figure of one of the first runaways, Ben. The text is educational and accessible, explaining its language and setting a map of early modern London and the empire for readers. It would make a brilliant addition to classes or syllabi on related topics, like black diasporic histories of Europe told through stories of resistance. For scholars of the American colonies, this may be new required reading for understanding London's central role in the development of transatlantic slavery, its financing, and early pro-slavery print discourse.
