TY - JOUR
AU - Molineux,, Catherine
AB - Running away in the Anglo-American Atlantic World left material traces in the archives. Among the most easily accessible are newspaper advertisements. Placed by British and American masters and mistresses, they detailed the physical and cultural traits of an absconded slave or servant, with the aim of soliciting public help in their recapture. These fleeting historical glimpses into flights from bondage have resonated powerfully in the U.S. and Britain since the civil rights movements. Scholars have used them to think about the relationship of colonialism to the development of modern state surveillance techniques. Efforts to resurrect and remember these individual acts of resistance have also illuminated historical challenges to the institution of slavery and the formation of early modern categories of freedom. The nature of these material traces tantalizes, in part because the advertisements are full of personal detail and yet very rarely can scholars find additional material to develop these biographical moments into full stories. It is perhaps that combination that has, since the 1980s, impelled people to compile and analyze them, as though a profound realization of their significance will only become clear in their aggregate. Since Lathan Algerna Windley published his four-volume compilation of colonial Virginia runaway advertisements (Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790 [1983]), these efforts have evolved to take advantage of new digitization and mapping techniques, as well as social media forms, such as Twitter. A quick web search yielded eleven distinct digitization projects currently ongoing, exploring various regions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American Atlantic. The efforts vary in quality and scope, ranging from virtual collections of documents to fully searchable databases, and in source, from digital humanities classes, to independent researchers, to collaborative professional projects. See, for example, the North Carolina Slave Advertisements project (1741–1840); the Geography of Slavery in Virginia project (Virginia and Maryland, 1736–1803); the Texas Runaway Slave Project; the Documenting Runaway Slaves research project (Mississippi); the Runaway Connecticut project; the Runaway Slave Ads project by AfriGeneas (Maryland, 1842–1863); and the Freedom on the Move project. There are also Twitter accounts to follow, such as @SlaveAdverts250 (colonial American runaway ads); @TxRunawayAds (Texas runaway ads from the 1800s); and a Twitter bot named @Every3Minutes, which mimics the rate of sale in the nineteenth-century U.S. All of these sites or accounts are based on the idea that collating the advertisements will enable new understandings of the dimensions of resistance, but they vary widely in their sophistication and scope. An excellent example is Runaway Slaves in Britain, a website maintained by the University of Glasgow and supported by the Leverhulme Trust. It represents one of the more recent projects, at the time of this review offering a searchable database of 835 English and Scottish newspaper advertisements that appeared between 1700 and 1780. It is the first digitization effort to focus on patterns of flight in eighteenth-century Britain, and it builds on a rich scholarship that is gestured toward in its “Resources” section. Each advertisement has been transcribed and in most instances includes a photograph of the original document. Eighty advertisements for the sale of enslaved individuals are also available, though only as a PDF download. Aside from a rather unwieldy search engine, a central confusion is the lack of clarity in the intended audience. Parts of the website, particularly toward the “back,” seem directed at classrooms of students below the university level: the “Teaching” section, for instance, focuses on the Minecraft project attached to this database. How the instructional YouTube videos are intended to be used was not clear. The “front” section and blog, by contrast, seem aimed at university students and independent or professional scholars. I can imagine that trying to be all things to all people is a classic struggle for this medium, but perhaps mission statements for each section and some editing of the navigation bar would prevent user confusion. For the purposes of this review, I am approaching the website from the perspective of its value for university-level research and teaching. From this perspective, the question has to be asked whether the sample size necessitates a full-blown database. In the tech world, 835 instances does not a database make—and, indeed, a downloadable Excel spreadsheet would be more useful for a researcher as it would facilitate their own data manipulation. An online spreadsheet would also enable crowdsourcing and integration of the data into larger Atlantic or global studies. The database makes employing these documents for small class research assignments easier. But the current search engine is not intuitive, requiring an uncomfortable horizontal scroll from the bottom of the page to establish filters. The filters also contain terms that, though helpfully described in the associated user guide, are not obvious. Without going through the entire dataset, for instance, I could not figure out what regional terms were used, as no list is provided. It was also not possible, surprisingly, to filter for runaways over the 1700–1780 period who ran from Londoners, because not all the specific place-names, such as streets or boroughs, have been marked as London (e.g., sometimes “Drury Lane” appears as the specific place, and sometimes it appears as “Drury Lane, London”). The net result is that the database finds 375 runaways from southeast England, but only 19 from London, when the vast majority of those 375 runaways likely ran from Londoners or from those with London businesses (globally searching for the word “London” produces 307 results, but not all of these are references to the city). The metadata needs to be improved, and a specific account of the research conducted should be included on the “Database” page or in the “Detailed Database Guide.” Employing an information architect might also help clarify and streamline the unwieldy search engine. The expository sections also raise issues as no author is stated (the role of the “Participants” is unclear) and no secondary literature is cited, making it difficult to engage with one’s fellow scholars. The introduction offers a substantive and provocative account of the advertisements’ significance, but it also makes a few specious claims—such as the notion that advertisements for runaway people of color “more closely follow the format of American and Caribbean runaway slave advertisements than they do the notices placed by English and Scottish masters of white servants and apprentices who had eloped.” Without evidence, that claim seems primarily about justifying the focus of the collection. It has not been my experience that these advertisements varied in genre between white runaways and runaways of color. Excluding white runaways from this database does enable a clearer comparison with the databases generated for runaway populations of colonial or early U.S. settings, because those databases also exclude white runaways. But this approach, in general, has the effect of abstracting these individual acts of resistance from the broader landscapes of labor. It obscures, in the British context, the uncertain legality of slavery and its particular spectrum of unfree to free labor. From my own research into runaways in Britain, it is also not clear that all efforts to reclaim these servants or slaves were equal; advertisements sometimes focused more on the return of property that a runaway had taken with them than with reclaiming the servant or slave themselves. A greater sense of the variation in these advertisements would complicate their function. And finally, some discussion of the fact that little data exists to judge the advertisements’ effectiveness would place them in better historical context and make them a more effective teaching tool. All that said, what the database makes clear is what historians have argued about patterns of slavery or servitude in Britain—that the population was small and primarily of African descent, though also included American Indians and South Asians. It also illuminates the extent of ownership of bonded labor by demonstrating the numbers of ship captains and commanders, merchants, and middling urban Britons who claimed such individuals. This compilation also enables quick searches, which can be highly useful for research. For instance, a recent former graduate student employed this database to explore the connection between coffee culture and slavery. The search function enabled her to determine that coffeehouses across London acted as collecting points for information about runaways, as well as places for slave sales. Some, such as the Carolina, Jamaica, Virginia, Pennsylvania, South Sea, or New England coffeehouses, were unsurprising, as they functioned as clearing houses for colonial news and as places to seek imperial opportunities. Similarly, the involvement of Garraway’s or Lloyd’s coffeehouses linked to the maritime industry suggests that the networks activated for capture engaged the same groups involved in the transatlantic trades that brought these individuals to Britain in the first place. Yet many more London coffeehouses participated in these retrieval networks, suggesting that these new spaces of socialization played a significant role in policing the boundaries of freedom within the city (Sarah Holliday, “A Bitter Legacy: Coffee, Identity, and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University [2019]). With some degree of fuzziness—not all coffeehouse locations are known—the data could be GIS mapped for further analysis. Runaway Slaves in Britain facilitated that inquiry by eliminating the work of wading through newspapers. It was also faster and more efficient than comparable digital searches in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection. The student identified 109 runaway cases in which London’s coffeehouses participated in the effort for retrieval. Because the dataset ends in 1780, she was, however, unable to ask the question of how abolition and emancipation affected these practices. The rationale for the chronological scope is not clear on the website: to fully capture these patterns of flight, it might be worth extending the frame at least back to 1680, when Britain became seriously involved in the Atlantic slave trade (and newspapers became popular), and forward through the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire in the 1830s. One of the questions that should always be raised about such datasets is what gets lost in the extraction of data from its broader historical context. As an experiment, I queried the database for flights and sales between April of 1733 and July of 1734, which happens to be the period of time that the colonial runaway Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (a.k.a. Job ben Solomon) lived in London and about whom I am currently writing. A general search of the database revealed that four people of color ran away in London during these months (one was of mixed race, one was South Asian, and two were Africans, with one of the latter born in Bermuda). A more specific date-range search function would have sped up this inquiry, as would a means to click between advertisements at the level of the details. Despite that, however, the search was much faster than the same search in the Burney Collection, which produced the same results but required eliminating many random hits. What does one lose by gaining that speed? The answer was wider historical context for the particular moment of flight. In between learning about these four London runaways, British newspaper readers also learned about several white servants who had fled. They read about a fight between a black man and a carpenter at Peckham fair, which resulted in the former’s death and the latter’s charge with willful murder. They heard that a gale stranded a London-owned ship worked by ten African and six English sailors on its way home with 140 hogsheads of sugar. They read that a Bristol boat sank, killing only the captain’s “negro” servant. A different British boat also sank, killing everyone except the master and a “negro boy” who grabbed hold of floating wood. News from the young Georgia colony told them that the Creek Indians had agreed to return all runaway slaves to the English settlement, in exchange for predetermined quantities of goods. In colonial Jamaica, planters were struggling to prevent their slaves from gathering at night to play drums and set off fireworks. General discussions of conversion efforts among enslaved populations also occupied newspaper readers. And so on—in short, the Atlantic World in which these four individuals ran gets lost when we abstract their acts from context. Running away in 1733–1734 was different from running away in 1780. Especially when he first arrived, Ayuba was terrified that he would be sold again (and, indeed, someone inquired whether he was for sale). To contextualize that experience, I wanted to be able to describe the frequency of sales in Britain, as well as how many other Africans in London might have shared his experience of flight as resistance. The website’s eighty “For Sale” advertisements include one from 1734, but the data sample is too small for much to be made of that instance. The accompanying text suggests, however, that such ads provide some insight into the threat of resale to plantation America—an interesting, if not fully substantiated, context for Ayuba’s fears. Runaway Slaves in Britain acknowledges that these advertisements capture only a tiny proportion of experiences with bondage, but it argues for their heuristic value: “We present the advertisements not with the intention of reproducing the violent circumstances of enslavement, but rather to delegitimize it by enabling readers to recognize the humanity of the individuals whose lives are hidden within a few lines of faded newspaper print.” There is something counterintuitive to the notion that amassing all the data points, a process that by its very nature strips those data points of context, is the means by which these individuals’ “humanity” is to be made visible. The advent of digitization has transformed the process of gathering and researching these material traces, but we should also be conscious of the limitations imposed by that process of abstraction on historical analysis and interpretation. Making public access to these documents easier and using them to engage young students with the history of slavery is laudable. The question remains, however, as to whether such projects truly deepen our understanding of the past. © The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Runaway Slaves in Britain: Bondage, Freedom and Race in the Eighteenth Century. https://www.runaways.gla.ac.uk/.
JF - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhz1078
DA - 2020-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/runaway-slaves-in-britain-bondage-freedom-and-race-in-the-eighteenth-1iGdQPw8qB
SP - 583
VL - 125
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -