The University of Glasgow’s Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Britain project has created a searchable database of over 800 newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved people who had escaped. Most of the runaways were of African descent, although some were from the Indian sub-continent and some were Indigenous Americans.
The database, which was launched this week, is fully searchable according to a wide range of criteria and includes full transcriptions and (where possible) reproductions of the advertisements. The Runaway Slaves project website also contains a wealth of background and interpretative material which will be helpful to anyone making use of the database.
As the project team note, the purpose of the database is not to replicate the objectification of enslaved people who were brought to eighteenth-century Britain as the enslaved property of white British men and women. Rather, the project team hopes that the advertisements will allow readers to explore and understand the people identified in the advertisements as historical subjects in their own right – as individuals who challenged their status and condition. The project team’s aim is that readers can use the database to uncover the individual stories of runaways, whose lives are “hidden within a few lines of faded newspaper print.” For a brilliant example of just how such lives can be unfurled from runaway advertisements, see Marisa Fuentes’ book, Dispossessed Lives (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).