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Freedom Seekers

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Freedom Seekers reveals the hidden stories of enslaved and bound people who attempted to escape from captivity in 17th-century London. It was the joint winner of the prestigious Frederick Douglass ...
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  • 01 February 2022
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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.

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Price: £12.00
Publisher: University of London
Imprint: University of London Press
Publication Date: 01 February 2022
ISBN: 9781914477249
Format: eBook
BISACs:

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Slavery, Slavery and abolition of slavery, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Colonialism and imperialism

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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.

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