Escaping Slavery in London
Not Just the Tudors
History Hit
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2022
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
In 1655, White Londoners began advertising in newspapers to retrieve enslaved people who had escaped. Groundbreaking research is bringing to light for the first time these stories of resistance by enslaved workers in Restoration London - including African children as young as eight - shedding light on the construction of a system of racial slavery, which has generally been regarded as happening in the colonies rather than in Britain itself.
In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Professor Simon P. Newman about his new book Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London, which reveals the hidden stories of the enslaved who attempted to escape from captivity.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Slavery was not simply a new plantation labour system thousands of miles from England, but |
| 0:11.2 | instead was an institution that was both real and present in London. It was not a colonial |
| 0:17.6 | abstraction, but a local social reality. So argues today's guest, whose latest book |
| 0:25.0 | explores the lives of those who were enslaved in London in the late 17th century and who |
| 0:30.3 | sought to escape. Drawing on the earliest known advertisements for runaways, the book |
| 0:36.0 | explores both enslavers' efforts to control and to objectify enslaved people as a commodity, |
| 0:43.4 | and the way those who were enslaved sought to break free to determine the course of their |
| 0:48.1 | own lives. Professor Simon Newman is a meritor's professor of history at the University of Glasgow, |
| 0:55.0 | and senior research fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This year he is visiting |
| 1:00.7 | scholar at the Charles Warren Centre for Studies in American History at Harvard University. |
| 1:05.3 | He is also founding editor of the Royal Historical Society book series New Historical Perspectives. |
| 1:12.4 | His new book is Freedom Seekers, escaping from slavery in restoration London. It has just |
| 1:17.9 | been published by the Institute of Historical Research and the University of London Press |
| 1:22.7 | and is available to download for free from www.humanities-digital-library.org. |
| 1:38.1 | Professor Newman, thank you so much for joining me to talk about freedom seekers and the really |
| 1:44.9 | fascinating research that you've done to explore the lives of these people who were looking |
| 1:49.3 | for their freedom in restoration London. We could perhaps start by talking a little bit about |
| 1:55.8 | language. I was very interested by the explanation you offer at the beginning of the book about some |
| 2:00.6 | of the crucial decisions in the use of language. Maybe this doesn't matter quite so much to people |
| 2:07.2 | who are hearing it, but I still think it's interesting that we now find the word slave problematic, |
| 2:12.9 | and you choose to capitalize black and white. And I wonder if you could talk me through the |
| 2:18.3 | thinking behind both of those. Yes, it's a really interesting subject which is changing all of the |
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