Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London

Winner of the 2024 ACLS Open Access Book Prize & Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award, and joint winner of the prestigious 2023 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London reveals the hidden stories of enslaved and bound people who attempted to escape from captivity in England’s capital. In 1655 White Londoners began advertising in the English-speaking world’s first newspapers for enslaved people who had escaped. Based on the advertisements placed in these newspapers by masters and enslavers offering rewards for so-called runaways, this book brings to light for the first time the history of slavery in England as revealed in the stories of resistance by enslaved workers. Featuring a series of case-studies of individual "freedom-seekers", this book explores the nature and significance of escape attempts as well as detailing the likely routes and networks they would take to gain their freedom. The book demonstrates that not only were enslaved people present in Restoration London but that White Londoners of this era were intimately involved in the construction of the system of racial slavery, a process that traditionally has been regarded as happening in the colonies rather than the British Isles. An unmissable and important book that seeks to delve into Britain’s colonial past.

Table of Contents:
Prologue: Imagining Ben 1. Preface: Freedom-seekers in Restoration London 2. The black presence in London 3. London 4. Newspapers 5. London’s freedom-seekers 6. Jack: Boys 7. Francisco/Bugge: South Asians 8. “A black Girl” and “an Indian black girl”: Female freedom-seekers 9. Caesar: Country Marks 10. Benjamin: Branded 11. Pompey: Shackled 12. Quoshey: Escaping from ships and their captains 13. Goude: Thames-side maritime communities 14. Quamy: Mercants, bankers, printers and coffee houses 15. David Sugarr and Henry Mundy: Escaping from colonial planters in London 16. Calib and “a Madagascar Negro”: Freedom-seekers in the London suburbs and beyond 17. “A Black Boy”: London’s connected community of slave-ownership 18. Freedom seekers and the law in England’s American and Caribbean colonies 19. London precedents in New World contexts: the runaway advertisement in the colonies Epilogue: King

About the Author :
Simon P. Newman is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Glasgow and is currently a research fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin. He has published widely on early modern Atlantic World and American/Caribbean history. His most recent book 'A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic' (2013) investigated the English and West African origins of plantation slavery in Barbados and beyond. Over the past decade he has been investigating enslaved people who resisted by escaping, both in the Caribbean and the British Isles, resulting in a major database 'Runaway Slaves in Britain: bondage, freedom and race in the eighteenth century'. He has also worked with playwrights, film-makers, creative writers, composers and others in Britain who are presenting this history to broad public audiences. In 2018 he commissioned and helped create the graphic novel 'Freedom Bound: Escaping Slavery in Scotland' which is now being used in schools across Scotland. In the same year he co-authored the University of Glasgow’s report into its links to slavery, and helped create the reparative justice programme that followed.

Review :
"There has long been a popular assumption that English slavery was a colonial phenomenon, alien to the liberty loving peoples residing in the British Isles. Newman turns that notion inside out. His painstaking research and luminous interpretation reveal a community of enslaved Black people in Restoration England, yearning to escape. Evocative prose and interactive illustrations enable us to imagine their flights on the streets of London, and also to perceive the arterial network of enslavers, merchants, investors, ship captains, and printers, who devised a novel way to repossess them: the runaway slave advertisement. Fashioned in the cradle of the liberal ideal, this artifact of business news would become one of the most iconic and tyrannical innovations of the age of empire and enslavement—and the clearest lasting proof of the countervailing will to freedom." — Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War This compelling book shows us Restoration London, but not as we know it. The book is a restoration in many senses: of dignity and of global context to the world of Samuel Pepys and the Great Fire. Simon Newman humanises those who were dehumanised by people who saw them as their property. Amongst the pages of this compassionate, evidence-based masterpiece, readers will discover the stories of freedom-seeking enslaved people in familiar places all over London, from Aldgate, Covent Garden and Greenwich to Fleet Street, Wapping and the East End. Through painstaking archival work these lives have been impressively reconstructed and reimagined, all underpinned by archival and interpretative rigour. Brimming with revelations at every turn, Freedom Seekers reorders our understanding of the making of racial slavery, finding the early traces of British exploitation of Black people in the streets, squares, lanes, and alleyways of the expanding metropolis. Restoration London may have been far from the plantation horrors of the empire in the Caribbean but it contained the same forces of human abuse. Simon Newman gives us a new way of seeing British slavery, one in which Black and Asian captives risked their lives for freedom across the Atlantic and on both sides of the Thames. With prodigious research into decades of newspaper advertisements of ‘runaways’, illuminating story-telling, copious illustrations and, most of all, sensitive attention to the humans hidden in print, this book is powerful proof that racial slavery in British history has never ever been only a colonial matter. Freedom Seekers is a triumph of inventive and accessible scholarship. The colonial criminality of the ‘runaway slave’ and of any who harboured them has much clearer connections to the cobbled streets of Westminster and the square mile than many will wish to acknowledge, but the records, as illuminated across Simon Newman’s brilliant study, are clear. Freedom Seekers is an accomplished, meticulous, and gripping study of Black men, women, and children who sought to change their lives in seventeenth-century London, and a book that all scholars of that city and that time should read. Though runaway slave advertisements have long been a recognized avenue into the experiences of later generations of enslaved persons, Newman’s book has done us the service of applying this method to the freedom seekers of seventeenth-century London. Even more significant, it establishes that for white Londoners, slavery … was intimately tied into the institutions and the day-to-day functioning of the metropolis.