Sugar Planters and Freedom Seekers in Seventeenth-Century London

Abstract

abstract:This essay explores the enslaved people brought to London by planters, merchants, and others from Barbados during the later seventeenth and very early eighteenth centuries. The domestic service that most of these enslaved people undertook was a far cry from the horrors of the Middle Passage or the fast-developing sugar plantation labor system emerging in Barbados, and well-dressed enslaved personal attendants may have helped normalize slavery in the eyes of Londoners who saw these Africans as being similar to the city's tens of thousands of white domestic servants. It was slavery nonetheless, and isolated, sometimes manacled, and always just one step away from a return to the Caribbean, the people featured in this essay all attempted to escape from their enslavers. The essay builds from the scant information contained in the newspaper advertisements published by their enslavers, as well as other sources such as parish records to show the determination of the enslaved to secure a measure of freedom, the ways in which Barbadian enslavers sought to strengthen slavery on both sides of the Atlantic, and the creation of the first "runaway slave" newspaper advertisements.