August 31, 2024 • 36 mins
Welcome to the Dis a fi mi History Podcast, where we delve into the rich tapestry of history, focusing on family histories and their relevance to Caribbean people, both past and present. In this episode, host Wendy Aris is joined by Simon P. Newman, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Professor Newman shares his extensive research on the history of slavery in the British Atlantic world, particularly his groundbreaking work on the database of runaway slave advertisements published in 18th century Britain. Discover the hidden stories of enslaved individuals who sought freedom and how these historical records challenge and enrich our understanding of Britain's past.
From the creation of the database to the surprising findings about the demographic makeup of enslaved populations, this episode offers a compelling look into the lives of those who resisted bondage. Learn about the educational initiatives and public engagement projects that have emerged from this research, including graphic novels and collaborations with artists and poets.
Tune in to explore how these narratives are reshaping discussions on rep
arative justice and the broader implications for understanding Britain's multicultural history. Don't miss this insightful conversation that bridges the past and present, highlighting the enduring significance of these untold stories.
If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to like, follow, subscribe, and write a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thank you for your support!
Bio:
Simon Newman began his career writing about popular political culture and social history in the era of the American Revolution. For the past fifteen years, he has focused on the history of slavery in the British Atlantic World, publishing a book on the origins of the plantation labor system. He led a Leverhulme Trust funded project creating a database of runaway slave advertisements published in eighteenth-century Britain, and this research has resulted in collaborations with playwrights, musical composers, film-makers and a graphic novelist who are all interested in the presence of enslaved people in Georgian Britain.
Professor Newman is interested in digital humanities and the potential it has for new kinds of resources and publications in slavery history. In 2018 he published the William and Mary Quarterly‘s first born-digital article, and he is aiming to publish the research he completed at the Institute as an Open Access digital book.
Professor Newman has also helped initiate a report into the degree to which the University of Glasgow benefited financially from Atlantic World racial slavery. Glasgow was the first British university to undertake such a study and to develop a program of reparative justice as a result.
Website: https://runaways.gla.ac.uk/
Book: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv293p4c5
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.
(00:06):
Gwan, everybody. Welcome to the Disafemi History Podcast,
where we'll be speaking about history and as well family history and how history
relates in terms of Caribbean people for the present, as well as in the past and how in the past,
what that does and brings forth for what we are going through at present and
(00:29):
what we can learn from our history, from our family and take that moving So
I do hope you enjoy the podcast.
And if you like it, please ensure to subscribe, like and review.
Thank you. In this episode, Wendy Aris will be joined with guest Simon P.
Newman, a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
(00:53):
For the past 15 years, Professor Newman has focused on the history of slavery
in the British Atlantic world.
Publishing his book, The History of Slavery in the British Atlantic World,
he has been a book on the origins of the plantation labor system.
He led a Leverhulme Trust-funded project creating a database of runaway slave
(01:14):
advertisements published in 18th century Britain,
and this research has resulted in collaborations with playwrights, musical composers,
filmmakers, makers and a graphic novelist who are all interested in the presence
of enslaved people in Georgian Britain.
(01:34):
We will be discussing the database of runaway slave advertisements published
in 18th century Britain.
So let's have a listen. Professor Newman, for coming on to the podcast to speak
about the website you've created here, the Runaway Slaves of Britain,
Bondage, Freedom and Race in the 18th Century.
(01:54):
And before we start, I'll just have you do a brief introduction of yourself.
My name is Simon Newman. Thank you very much for inviting me.
I'm delighted to be here with you.
For most of my career, I was a professor of American history at the University
of Glasgow, but I've retired from there now.
And I'm a research fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at
the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
(02:15):
Oh, very nice. Very nice. So we'll start.
And then my first question is, what was the impetus? What was the drive to start this project?
Well, I've spent most of my career as a historian of 17th and 18th century North
America and the Caribbean. in.
And during that time, I've written about the American Revolution.
I've researched the development of slavery in Britain's colonies.
(02:37):
And throughout that period, I've been very interested in freedom seekers,
the people, the enslaved people who resisted slavery by escaping.
But even though I was living and working in Britain at the University of Glasgow,
I hadn't appreciated that a significant number of enslaved people had been brought
to 17th and in 18th century Britain, or that many of these people had escaped.
(02:58):
But once I realized this, I began looking for the advertisements that enslavers
had published in British newspapers in an attempt by them to recapture the freedom seekers.
And I realized that there were a significant number of these.
So I applied to the Leverhulme Trust and secured research funding from them.
And with a small research team, we were able to create a publicly available
(03:20):
database of these advertisements, one that would allow users to sort and search
the data contained in them.
No, that's great because, again, trying to find these advertisements is like
kind of finding a needle in a haystack, so to speak.
I only have it just as a kind of like a PDF form, but nothing in terms of what
(03:41):
is on her website, in terms of the detail.
So I guess, you know, would you be able to provide, I guess,
an overview of the historical context of slavery in the 18th century Britain? Okay.
Well, English colonists began developing large-scale plantation slavery during
the second half of the 17th century.
They started in Barbados, and from there it spreads to Jamaica,
(04:02):
Virginia, and the other colonies.
And by the early 1700s, Britain was already the leading slave-trading nation
in Europe, annually shipping tens of thousands of people and enslaved Africans
throughout the Americas.
As part of that process, and starting very early in the 1650s, English merchants,
ship captains, planters, imperial officials, and other people began bringing
(04:25):
enslaved people back to Britain, usually to work as personal servants and attendants.
Many came from Africa, some from the colonies in the Caribbean and North America,
and a few came from South Asia. England and Scotland had different legal systems
and neither explicitly outlawed slavery.
It's not until the 1770s that courts in England and then Scotland ruled against
(04:47):
slavery in a somewhat limited way.
So what that means is that for over a century, slavery existed in Britain.
It didn't look anything like plantation slavery in the colonies,
but I quickly realized that shouldn't blind us to how real this slavery was.
Many of the enslaved people were male children, often brought from Africa at
(05:08):
a very young age, separated from their families.
They'd endured the Middle Passage, and then they were made to work for their enslavers in Britain.
And their trauma and subjection was very real.
So even if the conditions of their slavery might not appear as bad as working
on a Jamaica plantation, it doesn't mean the slavery was any less real.
Yeah i i again it's you know what you said is it's whether it's the plantation
(05:35):
or whether it's in britain it's still the same thing but definitely there's
a lot of wars with that as well and you know what would do do these advertisements
reveal about the lives of the enslaved people during this period.
That's the great challenge of these sources and the real excitement is in some
ways they reveal virtually nothing, and in other ways they reveal a huge amount.
(05:58):
They tend to be very short, between 50 and 100 words in length,
and they're written by enslavers who are anxious to recapture people who'd escaped.
And so they often contain a few words of description that reflect how the enslaver
saw and thought about the person who'd run away.
So we're not seeing how the person who ran away thought about themselves.
(06:19):
We're seeing how the person who claimed ownership of them thought about them.
And trying to find out more about these enslaved people is very challenging.
We very rarely have their own words or any real information about them.
But by carefully reading the advertisements and researching the local and larger
context, you can sometimes piece together information about an enslaved person.
(06:42):
So I'll give you one example.
This is published in the London Gazette in December of 1700,
and I'll read the advertisement.
Advertisement and of course i'm reading
language of the time which is language we wouldn't use today and so the advertisement
reads a negro named kwashi aged about 16 years belonging to captain edward archer
(07:05):
run away from bell wharf the 25th instant having on a plush cap with black fur fur,
a dark waistcoat, a speckled shirt,
old Kalamanka breeches, branded on his left breast with E-A,
but not plain, and shaved round his head.
Whoever brings him to Mr. Roland Tryon in Lime Street, or to Mr.
(07:26):
Richard Clerk at Bell Wharf in Shadwell, shall have a guinea reward and charges.
Now, as far as I know, this is the only surviving record of Quashi,
and it appears to tell us very little.
The advertisement describes what he was wearing in more detail than it actually,
describes the 16-year-old boy himself.
And all we really learn of him is that he was 16, shaved around his head,
(07:50):
and was branded on his left breast with the initials of his enslaver.
But we can surmise a bit more. Koshi is an Akan Dene, so it suggests that he
had been born on a Sunday in one of the Akan-speaking communities on the West African Gold Coast.
And from various records of the time, we learn that Edward Archer,
Quashie's enslaver, was the captain of a slave ship.
(08:13):
It's likely that Archer had acquired Quashie on his most recent voyage,
probably taking ownership of the frightened young boy and placing him aboard
his ship, which ironically was called the Happy Return, a small ship holding
just over a hundred enslaved people.
Most of those who survived the Middle Passage were sold to planters in Barbados,
but Quashie was retained by Archer as a personal servant.
(08:36):
And this was quite common. Ship captains were allowed to keep one or two and
save people for themselves.
Usually they sold them on arrival for profit in the colonies,
but sometimes they grow close to them and get used to having them as personal
servants and keep them. And then they bring them to Britain.
Now, the advertisement didn't say that Quashie had escaped from Archer.
It says that he had run away from Bell Wharf, which is an area of Dockland and
(09:00):
Stepney in London's East End. It's about a mile east of London Bridge.
This makes sense when we learn from other records that Captain Archer had already
left London on another slave trading voyage about a month before Quashie ran away.
We don't know why Archer left Quashie in London or who he entrusted with the enslaved boy.
(09:21):
Perhaps the captain didn't trust
or think the boy sufficiently capable to serve him on the long voyage.
Perhaps Archer wanted to protect him from disease and the horrors of the deadly
voyage, or perhaps Archer didn't want to use valuable space and provisions for
Quashi, instead availing himself of the opportunity to gain another enslaved person.
(09:42):
Whatever the reason, we do know some things.
Quashi was 16. He knew that he was enslaved, the property of another man.
The initials branded on his breast were a permanent reminder of that.
We know, too, that he wanted to be free. He escaped on Christmas Day,
1700, and that's a smart move.
He's taking advantage of a holiday and the chaos in London, and we know that
(10:04):
he was free for at least a week, probably longer, because a second advertisement appears a week later.
Three white men are mentioned in the advertisement, the absent enslaver,
Captain Archer, who's already left London, two other men to whom Quashie could be returned.
One was Richard Clarke, who lives in Shadwell in the East End,
and Quashie was, I think, living and working in Clarke's home,
(10:25):
very close to the River Thames. Clarke was another ship captain.
The third person was Roland Tryon, a well-known London merchant dealing in sugar
and other slave-produced commodities, and a director of the slave-trading Royal African Company.
And those three men show you're already developing a network in London of people
involved in slave trade and the trading goods produced by enslaved people.
(10:48):
Quashie's escape Escaping from all of them.
And the last thing we know is he disappears into London on the 25th of December.
He's in the area, the East End, where the largest black community is.
So he could potentially have found refuge there.
He might have joined the crew of another ship, but this time as a free man rather
than as an enslaved person.
(11:10):
The story ends. We don't know what happened. But we can, as you can see,
we can learn a little about the person by trying to read between the lines and
get information from outside of the agglomerate.
No, and these are like, I guess you could say they're like crumbs to be able
to use this information.
As you said, reading between the lines, decipher what that area is all about,
(11:32):
and to know the other names that are mentioned.
Again, just diving deep to really find, to try to piece together and make this
person more of what would have driven them away and what exactly that they're
trying to find for their freedom as well.
So, you know, for a lot of these advertisements, how were they collected and
(11:52):
verified for inclusion in the database?
Well, you said earlier it's a needle in a haystack project, and it is.
There are, as I'm sure you know, there are databases of advertisements published
in America and the Caribbean where hundreds, if not thousands,
have been collected together.
In Britain, some of the newspapers have been digitized and you can search them
(12:13):
for keywords. words, but it's
pretty unreliable because you've seen 18th century printed newspapers.
The print is often uneven and dodgy. So a computer trying to find a word like
black or African or things like that will miss a lot.
It'll miss almost as much as it finds. So there's no real substitute for going
through the newspapers, either on microfilm or the actual newspapers in the
(12:37):
British Library or other libraries around Britain.
So we had to scour through tens of thousands of issues of newspapers,
looking for advertisements.
And then each time we would find one, we'd photograph the advertisement,
we would transcribe it, enter the advertisement into the data and contain within it in the database.
We didn't get all of them by any means. We got as many as we could.
(13:00):
But since publishing the database, we've almost doubled the number we've got.
So there are a lot more yet to be entered into the database.
I can imagine, definitely. And I guess this goes back to,
I guess, the challenges that you face, because you mentioned some of them in
terms of interpreting because this is a lot of this is in old english and it's
very you have to read it a number of times to kind of you know to understand
(13:22):
you know how did this you know help or you know as this challenge that you faced
for interpreting these historical data,
well there is that very practical thing of figuring out what some of these words
mean we've included on the database a sort of lexicon and trying to explain
what some of these words me.
The more and more time you spend with these, the more you read,
(13:44):
the more it all begins to fall into place and you understand what they're talking
about. But it can take a while.
I think the biggest challenge is the very nature of these kinds of records.
Scholars like Saida Hartman and Marisa Fuentes have written very eloquently
about what they call the silence and the violence of the archive.
These advertisements are records of enslaved people in Britain,
(14:07):
but often they're the only mentions of these people that survive in any records.
So the only mention, the only source we have for these people is something written
by someone who enslaved them, describing them in just a few words.
And those advertisements are intended to confirm legal ownership of the people.
(14:27):
So the lives, the words, the souls of these enslaved people are papered over,
and the violence inherent in slavery was affirmed by and in these advertisements.
So phrases like the one in the advertisement I read, branded his left breast
with E-A, appear normal in every day.
If you're reading that, if you're looking at a newspaper like the London Gazette,
(14:48):
and there's an advertisement for books for sale, and an advertisement for a
ship that is being sold for whatever reason,
and in between them is one of these advertisements talking about a person being branded,
your eye just goes over it if you're one of these people in London in the 18th
century, because it's normal. It's every day you accept this.
(15:12):
So the violence of slavery is normalized in these advertisements,
and we have to read them very carefully, trying to find out about the lives
of people whose own lives and voices have been violently erased by the historical record. good.
It's much easier to write the stories of the people who enslaved them.
It's very hard without a lot of imagination, which we historians are sometimes suspicious of.
(15:36):
You have to have it here because you can't get to these people.
You can't imagine what their lives were like just using the facts.
Yes, exactly. You definitely do have to put a lot of inferences and just Just
know that, you know, just reading it and being very shocked at what you're reading,
knowing this was much worse than what was just what we're seeing and just black and white.
(15:58):
And I guess this, you know, leads to, you know, what were some of the most surprising
or significant findings within this project?
Well, I think for me, to my shame, as a historian who was raised and educated
in Britain, I have always thought that modern, multicultural,
multiracial Britain really began with Windrush, with the arrival of people from
(16:22):
first the Caribbean and then South Asia after World War II.
And to realize that there were a great many enslaved people in 17th and 18th
century Britain, many of them becoming free, and that there was a significant
black community, mainly in London, but also in cities like Glasgow, Bristol,
Liverpool, and in more rural locations,
(16:43):
that 17th and 18th century Britain was multiracial.
And i didn't really appreciate that
and i think it it's hugely important and some
of when we've gone into schools in
places like the east end of london where the large majority of the students
are first or second generation immigrant where the schools are multiracial and
(17:05):
multicultural that's the norm and for people for these kids to realize i'm my
family aren't new here this is something that's been going on in Britain,
that Britain has a black and a multiracial identity that's existed for centuries.
That's really important.
I think the other thing that really struck me as a significant finding was the demographic makeup.
(17:30):
Then over 94% male, so it's an unusually unbalanced population,
and nearly half of them are 17 or younger, and they're as young as six, seven, eight years old.
It's a young male enslaved population, many of them boys. Now,
of course, many of them will grow to adulthood.
(17:51):
Some will be sent back to the Caribbean or elsewhere, but many will become young
men in Britain, having grown up in Britain.
So I think those are the things that struck me the most.
I suppose the one other thing is the realization that as
many as a fifth of these enslaved
people who escaped in britain were south asian and
(18:13):
i hadn't realized that so many people were being brought in by
officials of the east india company no
it's you know once you start looking at a lot of these records and knowing how
especially for the empire of great britain how things moved within the colonies
because i know when i look at the records and see how you know going to the
(18:34):
colony of let's say novifosha that was still you know there was ships going back and forth and not,
those aren't things aren't mentioned in the history books, right?
So it definitely does, you know, change your perspective on things.
And, and how do you think that these, you know, the advertisements challenged
or reinforced the existing narratives about slavery in Britain?
(18:55):
Well, when I went to school, we learned virtually nothing about slavery.
I mean, that was a long time ago. I'm old.
And even today, or until recently in Britain, when slavery was taught,
it was about the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade,
and Britain's role in abolition.
Those were the things taught to students, if anything, about slavery.
(19:18):
So, to show that slavery was not simply something that happened over there in
the Americas and in West Africa,
that it was something that happened in Britain and was vital to the British
society and British economy, that it wasn't foreign, that Britain was the heart of British slavery.
(19:39):
I think that's really important. And these records show us that slavery existed,
was normal, was everyday in Britain itself.
At the same time, as I've said, they show that Britain was a multiracial society.
And that's where other records can help.
The parish records in London are hugely helpful, baptismal, marriage, and burial records.
(20:02):
And there's a wonderful project by
the london metropolitan archives which has put a
database of all of the mentions of people of color in
in these british these london paris records into a database you can search and
you realize baptism is the is the most significant appearance in the record
(20:23):
many of the people being baptized are older they're in their teens or they're
adults these are people Many of them who have escaped slavery,
or who are going to escape slavery, who are entering British society on their
own terms, who are making a stake in that society, becoming members of a congregation.
Sometimes there's evidence that that congregation will support and help them.
(20:47):
Then they will sometimes marry. often those
marriages are interracial which again shows something
that was not possible or legal in the colonies at that time
was normal in britain and
i think it's because although this population was
significant it was small and so it was not perceived as a threat by the white
working classes in britain it just wasn't big enough at that point and so for
(21:12):
interracial marriages and families to form wasn't a big deal and it just shows
us too that race and racism had to be created.
A hundred years later, Britain was very racist. And there was racism around
at this time too, but not so strong as to prevent this kind of entrance into
the community by people who'd escaped from slavery.
(21:32):
And I think that was very useful to find out and very important that it reaffirmed
for me how unnatural racism is. It has to be created.
And it wasn't automatically there at first. These people were brought in as
property and treated as property, but they could join churches,
they could escape, they could sometimes escape.
(21:54):
Create families, and nobody stopped them.
Yeah, it's very interesting as to how all of this transpires,
and again, how things are created and then projected, and then where you just
take it as a regular thing.
And what ways in which the project has been used in educational settings?
Well, from the very beginning, we worked with schoolteachers.
(22:17):
And one of the people on my project team, Nelson Mundell, had been a history
schoolteacher, and he's now back teaching history in schools.
And that really helped. So we made the website accessible to schools and school
teachers and helped with the development of lesson plans and teaching exercises.
Most significantly of all, we secured funding to commission a leading comic
(22:38):
book artist and graphic novelist, Warren Pleas, to create a graphic novel based
on the stories of three Scottish freedom seekers.
And we worked with Black Hearted Press in Glasgow and published this as freedom
bound, we were able to distribute 30 copies to every state secondary school in Scotland.
And so it's become part of the curriculum in Scotland.
(23:00):
So now when they teach British history, history of empire, history of slavery,
it's not simply something that happened over there.
It's something that happened in Scotland too.
And they're seeing it from the perspective of the enslaved. And as well as these
three short stories, there are all the sources they're based on,
the original advertisements,
what we found in other records, so that the students can see how you can build
(23:24):
out from those records to imagine larger stories and lives.
We also worked with Spread the Word and with Ink, Sweat, and Tears,
two literary groups in London and publishers.
We found more funding and we commissioned young Black and South Asian poets
and artists to create works based on my research into freedom seekers in London.
(23:46):
That was published as Runaways London.
This is also available online with resources for teachers that were developed
by the poets and the artists.
Those are the main ways we've worked with schools. Oh, that's fantastic.
And how would you say that for independent researchers and contributors,
how have they helped to expand the database? base.
(24:07):
Enormously. And I will always be grateful for the generosity of other scholars
and researchers who've shared the data they've uncovered.
Because as I said, and as you mentioned, this is a needle in a haystack operation.
We found some of the needles, but a lot of other people have found many more.
So it began with Professor John Cairns, who's a legal historian at the University
of Edinburgh, and he shared data with us about Scottish freedom seekers.
(24:31):
And since then, others have shared information, especially Mrs.
Audrey Dugee in the north of England and Mr.
Tony Barrett in London, who spent decades uncovering these just as a labor of love.
And they've shared that. So we hope that all of the information they've shared
will be included in the updated version of the database.
(24:51):
Perfect. And then I know that you mentioned before about Freedom Bound.
Can you you share any more about its role in the public engagement?
Yes. I...
Nelson, who was the history teacher who was on my project team,
talked to me about graphic novels and how useful they were.
I'm a professional historian. I was very suspicious. I thought,
(25:13):
no, that's not what we do.
But then I started talking to teachers and seeing in places like France,
they're used extensively in teaching and very successfully.
And what all of the teachers were saying to me was, this isn't going to stop
students from reading history and learning about history. It's going to get
them interested. This is how you catch them.
(25:37):
And we trialed some of the early drawings that Warren was doing in schools and
worked with the students.
And it was clear how engaged they were.
When we worked B6, which is a sixth form academy in the east end of London, so 16 to 18-year-olds.
(25:59):
And we were working with them looking at
some of the pictures and they started really riffing on
how stop and search by local
police of the black community in the east end of
london how similar it was to this surveillance of the
enslaved in 17th and 18th century london and
the attempts to recapture people who'd escaped and they projected themselves
(26:21):
into this and it was the drawings and the graphic novel that caught them if
i'd just shown them the advertisement i don't think it would have had the same
effect and so i i was convinced and we were able to get the funding.
That was a way to really get school students
and their teachers engaged and able to deal with this and and take on board
(26:44):
this kind of history no and it's it's i mean it's fantastic and not only that
that's the way to kind of i guess capture them into and to make it more personal
because when When you make it more personal,
that's when it starts to really get going.
And I know you mentioned as well, with Runaway Slaves in Britain,
(27:04):
how has that project influenced the discussion on reparative justice at the
University of Glasgow and beyond?
That's a really good question, because these two things were going on at the same time.
Glasgow was the first British university to engage with how it had profited
from slavery and the slave trade.
And it was appropriate. Glasgow is one of the six ancient medieval universities
(27:28):
in Britain, but it's the only one in a port city, an port city that was really
made wealthy by tobacco, sugar. So it was appropriate.
Stories. It was the stories. We were able to do the research,
because I did this with Stephen Mullen,
who was the other researcher, and we researched the report for the University
(27:50):
of Glasgow and the recommendations for reparative justice that came out of it,
to find who had given money to the university and where they'd got their money from.
It's very difficult to do, but we were able to do that kind of research.
But it's very abstract. You say this person spent time in Jamaica,
(28:11):
came back to Scotland, gave money to the university.
Well, that doesn't really inspire or for many people, it doesn't do much.
So our research was able to start telling stories behind that.
So I'll give you one example.
Robert Cunningham Graham was a graduate of the university. He went out to Jamaica,
(28:31):
spent nearly 20 years there, and made his fortune.
He married the sister of one of the wealthiest planters in Jamaica.
He came back to Scotland a very, very wealthy man.
He made a number of large gifts to the University of Glasgow,
including one for the best student essay on liberty, would you believe?
There's an irony. he served as rector of the university he succeeded edmund
(28:56):
burke and he was rector immediately before adam smith so you can tell the kind of company he was in.
Before he left jamaica to come back to scotland he owned about 35 enslaved people
and among them was a young woman beneba and her unnamed child and he sold them
and i think sold sold them to separate owners before he left the island.
(29:18):
He brought two enslaved people with him from Jamaica to work for him as enslaved servants in Scotland.
One of these was a young man named Martin. And we know from Cunningham Graham's
correspondence that within a year, he and his wife thought Martin had become
too lively and too sprightly.
(29:39):
Those were Graham's words. I think that when Martin was freed from the hell
that Jamaican slavery was and was in Scotland working alongside free white servants
and being allowed to become a member of a church and things like that if he wanted to,
I suspect that this young man wanted more freedom.
Maybe he tried to escape. Maybe he made clear he wanted to be free.
(30:02):
Whatever. Cunningham Graham acted quickly. and
he sent martin back to jamaica to be sold as a prime
plantation slave where he well
we know how horrible his life would have been little thought about martin's
fate graham instructed his jamaican agent to invest the proceeds of martin's
(30:23):
sale in a quantity of the best madeira wine and to send it back to him in scotland
and telling these kinds of stories to
the senior management of the University of Glasgow,
I remember standing up, and it's a small group,
and you could have heard a pin drop, because suddenly the gifts that this man,
who used to be mentioned in our annual ceremony when graduates,
(30:46):
the university ceremony, he was one of our big benefactors, Cunningham Graham,
and we would mention him.
Jamaica merchant was the term used to describe him in our ceremony,
and nobody thought what was behind those words.
And telling these stories of the enslaved, the way we were doing in Freedom
Seekers, was able to make it real.
(31:07):
We've named our new center, which is part of the reparative justice program
for the study of slavery and abolition, the Beneba Center, named for that woman
that he sold before he left.
And then as part of the reparative justice we're doing, we have a long-term
collaboration with the University of the West Indies, which is going to direct funding.
(31:28):
Raised by Glasgow towards strategic initiatives highlighted by CARICOM,
the Caribbean community, and their reparative justice report.
Together with them, we've developed the first online master's degree course on reparative justice.
So there are all kinds of good things coming out of this, but I think we needed
those human stories to really trigger a commitment to do this.
(31:51):
Absolutely. And I know you mentioned a lot of the next steps,
but is there any other next steps for the runaway slaves in Britain project?
Well, other projects have come out of this, including my own book,
Freedom Seekers, which was about people who escaped in 17th century London.
And that book has won the Frederick Douglass Prize for the best book on the
(32:11):
history of slavery and another book prize.
So it's great to see people recognize the importance of this history.
But the next important work is photographing a lot of the advertisements that
were not included in the first version of the database that we now know about,
processing all of that information and updating the database.
That work's been delayed because of the problems being experienced by the British
(32:33):
Library that you may have heard about, the big hack.
So it'll probably not be before, I don't think it'll be before next year that
we can get into the library and start photographing these.
But that's the most important thing, because it's clear people want this data
and information, so we want to make it as readily available as possible.
So for certain, and I know working on these different types of projects,
(32:55):
you know, can be very rewarding.
So for you, what has been the most rewarding aspect of working on this project for some?
Well, as I said at the beginning, I've been fascinated by freedom seekers for all of my career.
And I first used them in teaching more than 30 years ago. And from the beginning,
I recognized how students would respond to these sources.
(33:18):
And I've always thought it really important to try and honor the lives of enslaved
people by researching their lives and stories on their own terms as best we can.
And it's really exciting to see how the research behind this project can pull
together small pieces of information.
We can find the individual behind the words.
It's been great collaborating with other people like my team members,
(33:41):
Nelson Mandela and Stephen Mullen, but also working with creative artists,
with poets, artists, graphic novelists.
We've worked with filmmakers, playwrights, even student composers in Glasgow.
That's been fantastic to see young people inspired by this and want to create
artistic work based on it.
(34:03):
I think that's fantastic. And then seeing how students in classrooms respond
and how Now this opens their eyes to a new element of British history.
I think that's the most rewarding thing of all.
Yeah, you're just opening that door for everybody else to be able to see and
to navigate through it as well.
So, you know, as we end this discussion, which has been really great,
(34:24):
and what would be, I guess, your final thoughts for anyone kind of looking into
these types of records that you could provide?
I think the thing is, the most important thing is just to start reading some
of the advertisements and let your imagination do the work and start thinking
about, okay, what is someone running away from? What are they running to?
(34:46):
What help do they need? What kind of things have happened in their life?
How frightened and desperate must someone be to do this? Or how exciting and inspired must they be?
It's all there. In the end, we all start with just those 75 words or whatever in an advertisement.
(35:06):
And now online, there are many, many of these available from Canada,
North America, the Caribbean, the British Isles.
There are tens of thousands of these available online to look at.
Each one is a story. Each one is a life.
And it's exciting to think what's behind them.
(35:26):
Oh, yes. Just to be able to uncover that and to get deeper. I totally agree
with you on that because I know for myself in terms of researching,
it's always finding, well, what else?
You know, and as I said, you're using these as crumbs to dig further,
to dig further, to find out more.
But I do appreciate your time, Professor Newman, for coming on to the podcast
(35:46):
and to speak about, you know, again, these are narratives that are not necessarily
told and you're looking at it from a different lens and a different perspective, which is fantastic.
And again, thank you for the work that you're doing.
It's been my pleasure. Thank you for your interest in the project.
Hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you did, please make sure to like,
(36:10):
follow, subscribe and write a review for the episode wherever you listen to
your podcasts. Thank you.
Music.
Music.
(00:06):
Gwan, everybody. Welcome to the Disafemi History Podcast,
where we'll be speaking about history and as well family history and how history
relates in terms of Caribbean people for the present, as well as in the past and how in the past,
what that does and brings forth for what we are going through at present and
(00:29):
what we can learn from our history, from our family and take that moving So
I do hope you enjoy the podcast.
And if you like it, please ensure to subscribe, like and review.
Thank you. In this episode, Wendy Aris will be joined with guest Simon P.
Newman, a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
(00:53):
For the past 15 years, Professor Newman has focused on the history of slavery
in the British Atlantic world.
Publishing his book, The History of Slavery in the British Atlantic World,
he has been a book on the origins of the plantation labor system.
He led a Leverhulme Trust-funded project creating a database of runaway slave
(01:14):
advertisements published in 18th century Britain,
and this research has resulted in collaborations with playwrights, musical composers,
filmmakers, makers and a graphic novelist who are all interested in the presence
of enslaved people in Georgian Britain.
(01:34):
We will be discussing the database of runaway slave advertisements published
in 18th century Britain.
So let's have a listen. Professor Newman, for coming on to the podcast to speak
about the website you've created here, the Runaway Slaves of Britain,
Bondage, Freedom and Race in the 18th Century.
(01:54):
And before we start, I'll just have you do a brief introduction of yourself.
My name is Simon Newman. Thank you very much for inviting me.
I'm delighted to be here with you.
For most of my career, I was a professor of American history at the University
of Glasgow, but I've retired from there now.
And I'm a research fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at
the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
(02:15):
Oh, very nice. Very nice. So we'll start.
And then my first question is, what was the impetus? What was the drive to start this project?
Well, I've spent most of my career as a historian of 17th and 18th century North
America and the Caribbean. in.
And during that time, I've written about the American Revolution.
I've researched the development of slavery in Britain's colonies.
(02:37):
And throughout that period, I've been very interested in freedom seekers,
the people, the enslaved people who resisted slavery by escaping.
But even though I was living and working in Britain at the University of Glasgow,
I hadn't appreciated that a significant number of enslaved people had been brought
to 17th and in 18th century Britain, or that many of these people had escaped.
(02:58):
But once I realized this, I began looking for the advertisements that enslavers
had published in British newspapers in an attempt by them to recapture the freedom seekers.
And I realized that there were a significant number of these.
So I applied to the Leverhulme Trust and secured research funding from them.
And with a small research team, we were able to create a publicly available
(03:20):
database of these advertisements, one that would allow users to sort and search
the data contained in them.
No, that's great because, again, trying to find these advertisements is like
kind of finding a needle in a haystack, so to speak.
I only have it just as a kind of like a PDF form, but nothing in terms of what
(03:41):
is on her website, in terms of the detail.
So I guess, you know, would you be able to provide, I guess,
an overview of the historical context of slavery in the 18th century Britain? Okay.
Well, English colonists began developing large-scale plantation slavery during
the second half of the 17th century.
They started in Barbados, and from there it spreads to Jamaica,
(04:02):
Virginia, and the other colonies.
And by the early 1700s, Britain was already the leading slave-trading nation
in Europe, annually shipping tens of thousands of people and enslaved Africans
throughout the Americas.
As part of that process, and starting very early in the 1650s, English merchants,
ship captains, planters, imperial officials, and other people began bringing
(04:25):
enslaved people back to Britain, usually to work as personal servants and attendants.
Many came from Africa, some from the colonies in the Caribbean and North America,
and a few came from South Asia. England and Scotland had different legal systems
and neither explicitly outlawed slavery.
It's not until the 1770s that courts in England and then Scotland ruled against
(04:47):
slavery in a somewhat limited way.
So what that means is that for over a century, slavery existed in Britain.
It didn't look anything like plantation slavery in the colonies,
but I quickly realized that shouldn't blind us to how real this slavery was.
Many of the enslaved people were male children, often brought from Africa at
(05:08):
a very young age, separated from their families.
They'd endured the Middle Passage, and then they were made to work for their enslavers in Britain.
And their trauma and subjection was very real.
So even if the conditions of their slavery might not appear as bad as working
on a Jamaica plantation, it doesn't mean the slavery was any less real.
Yeah i i again it's you know what you said is it's whether it's the plantation
(05:35):
or whether it's in britain it's still the same thing but definitely there's
a lot of wars with that as well and you know what would do do these advertisements
reveal about the lives of the enslaved people during this period.
That's the great challenge of these sources and the real excitement is in some
ways they reveal virtually nothing, and in other ways they reveal a huge amount.
(05:58):
They tend to be very short, between 50 and 100 words in length,
and they're written by enslavers who are anxious to recapture people who'd escaped.
And so they often contain a few words of description that reflect how the enslaver
saw and thought about the person who'd run away.
So we're not seeing how the person who ran away thought about themselves.
(06:19):
We're seeing how the person who claimed ownership of them thought about them.
And trying to find out more about these enslaved people is very challenging.
We very rarely have their own words or any real information about them.
But by carefully reading the advertisements and researching the local and larger
context, you can sometimes piece together information about an enslaved person.
(06:42):
So I'll give you one example.
This is published in the London Gazette in December of 1700,
and I'll read the advertisement.
Advertisement and of course i'm reading
language of the time which is language we wouldn't use today and so the advertisement
reads a negro named kwashi aged about 16 years belonging to captain edward archer
(07:05):
run away from bell wharf the 25th instant having on a plush cap with black fur fur,
a dark waistcoat, a speckled shirt,
old Kalamanka breeches, branded on his left breast with E-A,
but not plain, and shaved round his head.
Whoever brings him to Mr. Roland Tryon in Lime Street, or to Mr.
(07:26):
Richard Clerk at Bell Wharf in Shadwell, shall have a guinea reward and charges.
Now, as far as I know, this is the only surviving record of Quashi,
and it appears to tell us very little.
The advertisement describes what he was wearing in more detail than it actually,
describes the 16-year-old boy himself.
And all we really learn of him is that he was 16, shaved around his head,
(07:50):
and was branded on his left breast with the initials of his enslaver.
But we can surmise a bit more. Koshi is an Akan Dene, so it suggests that he
had been born on a Sunday in one of the Akan-speaking communities on the West African Gold Coast.
And from various records of the time, we learn that Edward Archer,
Quashie's enslaver, was the captain of a slave ship.
(08:13):
It's likely that Archer had acquired Quashie on his most recent voyage,
probably taking ownership of the frightened young boy and placing him aboard
his ship, which ironically was called the Happy Return, a small ship holding
just over a hundred enslaved people.
Most of those who survived the Middle Passage were sold to planters in Barbados,
but Quashie was retained by Archer as a personal servant.
(08:36):
And this was quite common. Ship captains were allowed to keep one or two and
save people for themselves.
Usually they sold them on arrival for profit in the colonies,
but sometimes they grow close to them and get used to having them as personal
servants and keep them. And then they bring them to Britain.
Now, the advertisement didn't say that Quashie had escaped from Archer.
It says that he had run away from Bell Wharf, which is an area of Dockland and
(09:00):
Stepney in London's East End. It's about a mile east of London Bridge.
This makes sense when we learn from other records that Captain Archer had already
left London on another slave trading voyage about a month before Quashie ran away.
We don't know why Archer left Quashie in London or who he entrusted with the enslaved boy.
(09:21):
Perhaps the captain didn't trust
or think the boy sufficiently capable to serve him on the long voyage.
Perhaps Archer wanted to protect him from disease and the horrors of the deadly
voyage, or perhaps Archer didn't want to use valuable space and provisions for
Quashi, instead availing himself of the opportunity to gain another enslaved person.
(09:42):
Whatever the reason, we do know some things.
Quashi was 16. He knew that he was enslaved, the property of another man.
The initials branded on his breast were a permanent reminder of that.
We know, too, that he wanted to be free. He escaped on Christmas Day,
1700, and that's a smart move.
He's taking advantage of a holiday and the chaos in London, and we know that
(10:04):
he was free for at least a week, probably longer, because a second advertisement appears a week later.
Three white men are mentioned in the advertisement, the absent enslaver,
Captain Archer, who's already left London, two other men to whom Quashie could be returned.
One was Richard Clarke, who lives in Shadwell in the East End,
and Quashie was, I think, living and working in Clarke's home,
(10:25):
very close to the River Thames. Clarke was another ship captain.
The third person was Roland Tryon, a well-known London merchant dealing in sugar
and other slave-produced commodities, and a director of the slave-trading Royal African Company.
And those three men show you're already developing a network in London of people
involved in slave trade and the trading goods produced by enslaved people.
(10:48):
Quashie's escape Escaping from all of them.
And the last thing we know is he disappears into London on the 25th of December.
He's in the area, the East End, where the largest black community is.
So he could potentially have found refuge there.
He might have joined the crew of another ship, but this time as a free man rather
than as an enslaved person.
(11:10):
The story ends. We don't know what happened. But we can, as you can see,
we can learn a little about the person by trying to read between the lines and
get information from outside of the agglomerate.
No, and these are like, I guess you could say they're like crumbs to be able
to use this information.
As you said, reading between the lines, decipher what that area is all about,
(11:32):
and to know the other names that are mentioned.
Again, just diving deep to really find, to try to piece together and make this
person more of what would have driven them away and what exactly that they're
trying to find for their freedom as well.
So, you know, for a lot of these advertisements, how were they collected and
(11:52):
verified for inclusion in the database?
Well, you said earlier it's a needle in a haystack project, and it is.
There are, as I'm sure you know, there are databases of advertisements published
in America and the Caribbean where hundreds, if not thousands,
have been collected together.
In Britain, some of the newspapers have been digitized and you can search them
(12:13):
for keywords. words, but it's
pretty unreliable because you've seen 18th century printed newspapers.
The print is often uneven and dodgy. So a computer trying to find a word like
black or African or things like that will miss a lot.
It'll miss almost as much as it finds. So there's no real substitute for going
through the newspapers, either on microfilm or the actual newspapers in the
(12:37):
British Library or other libraries around Britain.
So we had to scour through tens of thousands of issues of newspapers,
looking for advertisements.
And then each time we would find one, we'd photograph the advertisement,
we would transcribe it, enter the advertisement into the data and contain within it in the database.
We didn't get all of them by any means. We got as many as we could.
(13:00):
But since publishing the database, we've almost doubled the number we've got.
So there are a lot more yet to be entered into the database.
I can imagine, definitely. And I guess this goes back to,
I guess, the challenges that you face, because you mentioned some of them in
terms of interpreting because this is a lot of this is in old english and it's
very you have to read it a number of times to kind of you know to understand
(13:22):
you know how did this you know help or you know as this challenge that you faced
for interpreting these historical data,
well there is that very practical thing of figuring out what some of these words
mean we've included on the database a sort of lexicon and trying to explain
what some of these words me.
The more and more time you spend with these, the more you read,
(13:44):
the more it all begins to fall into place and you understand what they're talking
about. But it can take a while.
I think the biggest challenge is the very nature of these kinds of records.
Scholars like Saida Hartman and Marisa Fuentes have written very eloquently
about what they call the silence and the violence of the archive.
These advertisements are records of enslaved people in Britain,
(14:07):
but often they're the only mentions of these people that survive in any records.
So the only mention, the only source we have for these people is something written
by someone who enslaved them, describing them in just a few words.
And those advertisements are intended to confirm legal ownership of the people.
(14:27):
So the lives, the words, the souls of these enslaved people are papered over,
and the violence inherent in slavery was affirmed by and in these advertisements.
So phrases like the one in the advertisement I read, branded his left breast
with E-A, appear normal in every day.
If you're reading that, if you're looking at a newspaper like the London Gazette,
(14:48):
and there's an advertisement for books for sale, and an advertisement for a
ship that is being sold for whatever reason,
and in between them is one of these advertisements talking about a person being branded,
your eye just goes over it if you're one of these people in London in the 18th
century, because it's normal. It's every day you accept this.
(15:12):
So the violence of slavery is normalized in these advertisements,
and we have to read them very carefully, trying to find out about the lives
of people whose own lives and voices have been violently erased by the historical record. good.
It's much easier to write the stories of the people who enslaved them.
It's very hard without a lot of imagination, which we historians are sometimes suspicious of.
(15:36):
You have to have it here because you can't get to these people.
You can't imagine what their lives were like just using the facts.
Yes, exactly. You definitely do have to put a lot of inferences and just Just
know that, you know, just reading it and being very shocked at what you're reading,
knowing this was much worse than what was just what we're seeing and just black and white.
(15:58):
And I guess this, you know, leads to, you know, what were some of the most surprising
or significant findings within this project?
Well, I think for me, to my shame, as a historian who was raised and educated
in Britain, I have always thought that modern, multicultural,
multiracial Britain really began with Windrush, with the arrival of people from
(16:22):
first the Caribbean and then South Asia after World War II.
And to realize that there were a great many enslaved people in 17th and 18th
century Britain, many of them becoming free, and that there was a significant
black community, mainly in London, but also in cities like Glasgow, Bristol,
Liverpool, and in more rural locations,
(16:43):
that 17th and 18th century Britain was multiracial.
And i didn't really appreciate that
and i think it it's hugely important and some
of when we've gone into schools in
places like the east end of london where the large majority of the students
are first or second generation immigrant where the schools are multiracial and
(17:05):
multicultural that's the norm and for people for these kids to realize i'm my
family aren't new here this is something that's been going on in Britain,
that Britain has a black and a multiracial identity that's existed for centuries.
That's really important.
I think the other thing that really struck me as a significant finding was the demographic makeup.
(17:30):
Then over 94% male, so it's an unusually unbalanced population,
and nearly half of them are 17 or younger, and they're as young as six, seven, eight years old.
It's a young male enslaved population, many of them boys. Now,
of course, many of them will grow to adulthood.
(17:51):
Some will be sent back to the Caribbean or elsewhere, but many will become young
men in Britain, having grown up in Britain.
So I think those are the things that struck me the most.
I suppose the one other thing is the realization that as
many as a fifth of these enslaved
people who escaped in britain were south asian and
(18:13):
i hadn't realized that so many people were being brought in by
officials of the east india company no
it's you know once you start looking at a lot of these records and knowing how
especially for the empire of great britain how things moved within the colonies
because i know when i look at the records and see how you know going to the
(18:34):
colony of let's say novifosha that was still you know there was ships going back and forth and not,
those aren't things aren't mentioned in the history books, right?
So it definitely does, you know, change your perspective on things.
And, and how do you think that these, you know, the advertisements challenged
or reinforced the existing narratives about slavery in Britain?
(18:55):
Well, when I went to school, we learned virtually nothing about slavery.
I mean, that was a long time ago. I'm old.
And even today, or until recently in Britain, when slavery was taught,
it was about the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade,
and Britain's role in abolition.
Those were the things taught to students, if anything, about slavery.
(19:18):
So, to show that slavery was not simply something that happened over there in
the Americas and in West Africa,
that it was something that happened in Britain and was vital to the British
society and British economy, that it wasn't foreign, that Britain was the heart of British slavery.
(19:39):
I think that's really important. And these records show us that slavery existed,
was normal, was everyday in Britain itself.
At the same time, as I've said, they show that Britain was a multiracial society.
And that's where other records can help.
The parish records in London are hugely helpful, baptismal, marriage, and burial records.
(20:02):
And there's a wonderful project by
the london metropolitan archives which has put a
database of all of the mentions of people of color in
in these british these london paris records into a database you can search and
you realize baptism is the is the most significant appearance in the record
(20:23):
many of the people being baptized are older they're in their teens or they're
adults these are people Many of them who have escaped slavery,
or who are going to escape slavery, who are entering British society on their
own terms, who are making a stake in that society, becoming members of a congregation.
Sometimes there's evidence that that congregation will support and help them.
(20:47):
Then they will sometimes marry. often those
marriages are interracial which again shows something
that was not possible or legal in the colonies at that time
was normal in britain and
i think it's because although this population was
significant it was small and so it was not perceived as a threat by the white
working classes in britain it just wasn't big enough at that point and so for
(21:12):
interracial marriages and families to form wasn't a big deal and it just shows
us too that race and racism had to be created.
A hundred years later, Britain was very racist. And there was racism around
at this time too, but not so strong as to prevent this kind of entrance into
the community by people who'd escaped from slavery.
(21:32):
And I think that was very useful to find out and very important that it reaffirmed
for me how unnatural racism is. It has to be created.
And it wasn't automatically there at first. These people were brought in as
property and treated as property, but they could join churches,
they could escape, they could sometimes escape.
(21:54):
Create families, and nobody stopped them.
Yeah, it's very interesting as to how all of this transpires,
and again, how things are created and then projected, and then where you just
take it as a regular thing.
And what ways in which the project has been used in educational settings?
Well, from the very beginning, we worked with schoolteachers.
(22:17):
And one of the people on my project team, Nelson Mundell, had been a history
schoolteacher, and he's now back teaching history in schools.
And that really helped. So we made the website accessible to schools and school
teachers and helped with the development of lesson plans and teaching exercises.
Most significantly of all, we secured funding to commission a leading comic
(22:38):
book artist and graphic novelist, Warren Pleas, to create a graphic novel based
on the stories of three Scottish freedom seekers.
And we worked with Black Hearted Press in Glasgow and published this as freedom
bound, we were able to distribute 30 copies to every state secondary school in Scotland.
And so it's become part of the curriculum in Scotland.
(23:00):
So now when they teach British history, history of empire, history of slavery,
it's not simply something that happened over there.
It's something that happened in Scotland too.
And they're seeing it from the perspective of the enslaved. And as well as these
three short stories, there are all the sources they're based on,
the original advertisements,
what we found in other records, so that the students can see how you can build
(23:24):
out from those records to imagine larger stories and lives.
We also worked with Spread the Word and with Ink, Sweat, and Tears,
two literary groups in London and publishers.
We found more funding and we commissioned young Black and South Asian poets
and artists to create works based on my research into freedom seekers in London.
(23:46):
That was published as Runaways London.
This is also available online with resources for teachers that were developed
by the poets and the artists.
Those are the main ways we've worked with schools. Oh, that's fantastic.
And how would you say that for independent researchers and contributors,
how have they helped to expand the database? base.
(24:07):
Enormously. And I will always be grateful for the generosity of other scholars
and researchers who've shared the data they've uncovered.
Because as I said, and as you mentioned, this is a needle in a haystack operation.
We found some of the needles, but a lot of other people have found many more.
So it began with Professor John Cairns, who's a legal historian at the University
of Edinburgh, and he shared data with us about Scottish freedom seekers.
(24:31):
And since then, others have shared information, especially Mrs.
Audrey Dugee in the north of England and Mr.
Tony Barrett in London, who spent decades uncovering these just as a labor of love.
And they've shared that. So we hope that all of the information they've shared
will be included in the updated version of the database.
(24:51):
Perfect. And then I know that you mentioned before about Freedom Bound.
Can you you share any more about its role in the public engagement?
Yes. I...
Nelson, who was the history teacher who was on my project team,
talked to me about graphic novels and how useful they were.
I'm a professional historian. I was very suspicious. I thought,
(25:13):
no, that's not what we do.
But then I started talking to teachers and seeing in places like France,
they're used extensively in teaching and very successfully.
And what all of the teachers were saying to me was, this isn't going to stop
students from reading history and learning about history. It's going to get
them interested. This is how you catch them.
(25:37):
And we trialed some of the early drawings that Warren was doing in schools and
worked with the students.
And it was clear how engaged they were.
When we worked B6, which is a sixth form academy in the east end of London, so 16 to 18-year-olds.
(25:59):
And we were working with them looking at
some of the pictures and they started really riffing on
how stop and search by local
police of the black community in the east end of
london how similar it was to this surveillance of the
enslaved in 17th and 18th century london and
the attempts to recapture people who'd escaped and they projected themselves
(26:21):
into this and it was the drawings and the graphic novel that caught them if
i'd just shown them the advertisement i don't think it would have had the same
effect and so i i was convinced and we were able to get the funding.
That was a way to really get school students
and their teachers engaged and able to deal with this and and take on board
(26:44):
this kind of history no and it's it's i mean it's fantastic and not only that
that's the way to kind of i guess capture them into and to make it more personal
because when When you make it more personal,
that's when it starts to really get going.
And I know you mentioned as well, with Runaway Slaves in Britain,
(27:04):
how has that project influenced the discussion on reparative justice at the
University of Glasgow and beyond?
That's a really good question, because these two things were going on at the same time.
Glasgow was the first British university to engage with how it had profited
from slavery and the slave trade.
And it was appropriate. Glasgow is one of the six ancient medieval universities
(27:28):
in Britain, but it's the only one in a port city, an port city that was really
made wealthy by tobacco, sugar. So it was appropriate.
Stories. It was the stories. We were able to do the research,
because I did this with Stephen Mullen,
who was the other researcher, and we researched the report for the University
(27:50):
of Glasgow and the recommendations for reparative justice that came out of it,
to find who had given money to the university and where they'd got their money from.
It's very difficult to do, but we were able to do that kind of research.
But it's very abstract. You say this person spent time in Jamaica,
(28:11):
came back to Scotland, gave money to the university.
Well, that doesn't really inspire or for many people, it doesn't do much.
So our research was able to start telling stories behind that.
So I'll give you one example.
Robert Cunningham Graham was a graduate of the university. He went out to Jamaica,
(28:31):
spent nearly 20 years there, and made his fortune.
He married the sister of one of the wealthiest planters in Jamaica.
He came back to Scotland a very, very wealthy man.
He made a number of large gifts to the University of Glasgow,
including one for the best student essay on liberty, would you believe?
There's an irony. he served as rector of the university he succeeded edmund
(28:56):
burke and he was rector immediately before adam smith so you can tell the kind of company he was in.
Before he left jamaica to come back to scotland he owned about 35 enslaved people
and among them was a young woman beneba and her unnamed child and he sold them
and i think sold sold them to separate owners before he left the island.
(29:18):
He brought two enslaved people with him from Jamaica to work for him as enslaved servants in Scotland.
One of these was a young man named Martin. And we know from Cunningham Graham's
correspondence that within a year, he and his wife thought Martin had become
too lively and too sprightly.
(29:39):
Those were Graham's words. I think that when Martin was freed from the hell
that Jamaican slavery was and was in Scotland working alongside free white servants
and being allowed to become a member of a church and things like that if he wanted to,
I suspect that this young man wanted more freedom.
Maybe he tried to escape. Maybe he made clear he wanted to be free.
(30:02):
Whatever. Cunningham Graham acted quickly. and
he sent martin back to jamaica to be sold as a prime
plantation slave where he well
we know how horrible his life would have been little thought about martin's
fate graham instructed his jamaican agent to invest the proceeds of martin's
(30:23):
sale in a quantity of the best madeira wine and to send it back to him in scotland
and telling these kinds of stories to
the senior management of the University of Glasgow,
I remember standing up, and it's a small group,
and you could have heard a pin drop, because suddenly the gifts that this man,
who used to be mentioned in our annual ceremony when graduates,
(30:46):
the university ceremony, he was one of our big benefactors, Cunningham Graham,
and we would mention him.
Jamaica merchant was the term used to describe him in our ceremony,
and nobody thought what was behind those words.
And telling these stories of the enslaved, the way we were doing in Freedom
Seekers, was able to make it real.
(31:07):
We've named our new center, which is part of the reparative justice program
for the study of slavery and abolition, the Beneba Center, named for that woman
that he sold before he left.
And then as part of the reparative justice we're doing, we have a long-term
collaboration with the University of the West Indies, which is going to direct funding.
(31:28):
Raised by Glasgow towards strategic initiatives highlighted by CARICOM,
the Caribbean community, and their reparative justice report.
Together with them, we've developed the first online master's degree course on reparative justice.
So there are all kinds of good things coming out of this, but I think we needed
those human stories to really trigger a commitment to do this.
(31:51):
Absolutely. And I know you mentioned a lot of the next steps,
but is there any other next steps for the runaway slaves in Britain project?
Well, other projects have come out of this, including my own book,
Freedom Seekers, which was about people who escaped in 17th century London.
And that book has won the Frederick Douglass Prize for the best book on the
(32:11):
history of slavery and another book prize.
So it's great to see people recognize the importance of this history.
But the next important work is photographing a lot of the advertisements that
were not included in the first version of the database that we now know about,
processing all of that information and updating the database.
That work's been delayed because of the problems being experienced by the British
(32:33):
Library that you may have heard about, the big hack.
So it'll probably not be before, I don't think it'll be before next year that
we can get into the library and start photographing these.
But that's the most important thing, because it's clear people want this data
and information, so we want to make it as readily available as possible.
So for certain, and I know working on these different types of projects,
(32:55):
you know, can be very rewarding.
So for you, what has been the most rewarding aspect of working on this project for some?
Well, as I said at the beginning, I've been fascinated by freedom seekers for all of my career.
And I first used them in teaching more than 30 years ago. And from the beginning,
I recognized how students would respond to these sources.
(33:18):
And I've always thought it really important to try and honor the lives of enslaved
people by researching their lives and stories on their own terms as best we can.
And it's really exciting to see how the research behind this project can pull
together small pieces of information.
We can find the individual behind the words.
It's been great collaborating with other people like my team members,
(33:41):
Nelson Mandela and Stephen Mullen, but also working with creative artists,
with poets, artists, graphic novelists.
We've worked with filmmakers, playwrights, even student composers in Glasgow.
That's been fantastic to see young people inspired by this and want to create
artistic work based on it.
(34:03):
I think that's fantastic. And then seeing how students in classrooms respond
and how Now this opens their eyes to a new element of British history.
I think that's the most rewarding thing of all.
Yeah, you're just opening that door for everybody else to be able to see and
to navigate through it as well.
So, you know, as we end this discussion, which has been really great,
(34:24):
and what would be, I guess, your final thoughts for anyone kind of looking into
these types of records that you could provide?
I think the thing is, the most important thing is just to start reading some
of the advertisements and let your imagination do the work and start thinking
about, okay, what is someone running away from? What are they running to?
(34:46):
What help do they need? What kind of things have happened in their life?
How frightened and desperate must someone be to do this? Or how exciting and inspired must they be?
It's all there. In the end, we all start with just those 75 words or whatever in an advertisement.
(35:06):
And now online, there are many, many of these available from Canada,
North America, the Caribbean, the British Isles.
There are tens of thousands of these available online to look at.
Each one is a story. Each one is a life.
And it's exciting to think what's behind them.
(35:26):
Oh, yes. Just to be able to uncover that and to get deeper. I totally agree
with you on that because I know for myself in terms of researching,
it's always finding, well, what else?
You know, and as I said, you're using these as crumbs to dig further,
to dig further, to find out more.
But I do appreciate your time, Professor Newman, for coming on to the podcast
(35:46):
and to speak about, you know, again, these are narratives that are not necessarily
told and you're looking at it from a different lens and a different perspective, which is fantastic.
And again, thank you for the work that you're doing.
It's been my pleasure. Thank you for your interest in the project.
Hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you did, please make sure to like,
(36:10):
follow, subscribe and write a review for the episode wherever you listen to
your podcasts. Thank you.
Music.
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