When faced with the silences of the archives and their reification of the hierarchical power dynamics of slavery, how does one recover the voices and lived experiences of the oppressed? In his 2022 monograph Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London, Simon P. Newman provides an answer. Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Glasgow, Honorary Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, and a Brown 2026 Visiting Fellow Newman is a renowned historian of colonial America and the early modern British Atlantic. In addition to his expertise in the Americas, he leverages over a decade of research into the history of slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the British world to deliver a sagacious and methodologically striking monograph in Freedom Seekers.
At the heart of Newman’s work is the aim of bringing to light the agency, humanity, and lived experience of enslaved Africans seeking freedom in late seventeenth century London. While this is an approach fraught with challenges, Newman strives to encourage “readers to imagine real people who remembered, who suffered, who ate, who slept, who laughed, who sang and who danced” (Newman, xxv). In addition to recovering the voices of the enslaved, Newman also articulates a central polemic. He challenges existing historiography of the development of institutionalized racial slavery which is primarily occupied with Britain’s American colonies. These scholars “have assumed that White colonists enslaved West Africans and indigenous Americans beyond the oversight of an English government that was preoccupied with religious conflict, civil war and the Cromwellian Protectorate” (Newman, xxvi). Instead, Newman argues that English efforts on English soil were directly involved in forming this system of racialized oppression. In fact, he states that “Racial slavery was being created simultaneously in London and in the colonies, and the development of runaway slave advertisements as a response to this form of slave resistance [escape] was actually a London creation” (Newman, xxvii). Newman places print media and London at a critical juncture in the construction of the racial slavery so often attributed to the colonies.
Freedom Seekers is organized in three parts, each with a distinct purpose. Newman uses the first of these to provide a broader historical context of Restoration London. It is comprised of three chapters: one detailing the exponentially growing metropolis of London during the period, another exploring the Black community of London at the time, and the last an overview of freedom seekers in London as a group. These chapters not only provide the setting for the more personal and focused analysis Newman brings later, but also platform two of his sub-arguments. One of these is the rising influence of print and news media with newspapers, primarily the London Gazette, combining with the growing commercial communities of the Royal Exchange and coffee houses to create a ‘new public sphere’ (Newman, 22). This environment was a rich network for the dissemination of information. It was therefore ripe for the runaway advertisements which were a critical tool for the enforcement of racialized slavery and which serve as the core of Newman’s primary source base.
These chapters also illuminate the growing urban and commercial community in the metropole which put out these runaway ads. As Newman argues, “An interconnected web of aristocrats, gentry, merchants, bankers, coffee shop owners, craftsmen, shipwrights, ship captains and their families in the capital emerge from these newspaper notices, revealing the connections between those who owned or directly benefitted from the traffic in and exploitation of enslaved people both in the colonies and in London (Newman, 67). It is this assemblage of Londoners who were engaged “in their own domestic process of defining slavery as they understood and practiced it” based on the concept of theft (in this case the enslaved person stealing their own body by escaping) that Newman attributes the development of racial slavery in London to. In addition, he begins here to articulate an argument which also features prominently is his third major section that the runaway slave advertisement, which “would become the most ubiquitous evidence of resistance by the enslaved” in the English-speaking Atlantic, originated in London and then matriculated to the colonies (Newman, 67).
The second part of the monograph is a collection of twelve chapters which each outline a category or characteristic of the freedom seekers. As the main body of the book, these chapters focus on the freedom seekers as a whole, using specific individuals as representative windows into larger groupings. For example, Newman examines particular demographic divisions such as boys or South Asians as well as common experiences such as escaping from a maritime context or branding. It is here where he especially focuses on giving voice to these people often overlooked in the historical narrative.
Following this, Newman concludes the book with a third part which extends his analysis and its ramifications to the colonies in three chapters. Of particular note here is his bolstering of the argument that the runaway advertisement system developed in London spread to the colonies. Rather than examine London in isolation, he connects it to the broader British Empire. The epilogue focused on the escape of John King, a person enslaved by Benjamin Franklin (whose printing business often published runaway advertisements), serves to thematically bring this argument full circle (Newman, 217-218).
The most impressive facet of Freedom Seekers is Newman’s methodology. He employs a large collection of runaway slave advertisements as his main body of primary sources. These advertisements published in London newspapers present both opportunities and challenges which Newman navigates with aplomb. They offer an important, if limited window, into the lives and humanity of enslaved persons as “by definition these advertisements reveal resistance to bondage and assertions of individuality and agency” (Newman, xxvii). These individuals rarely appear in the historical record outside of these advertisements and occasional parish records, another source used by Newman, but what can be understood about them is drawn out by the author.
While doing so, he also struggles against the danger of reifying the hierarchical power of the enslaver. Newman clearly explains that “the few dozen words of each advertisement were those of an enslaver… asserting legal control of the freedom seeker, defying his or her agency” (Newman, xxvii). These advertisements are a historical artifact of oppression, and he is clear eyed about the violence of the archive that must be combatted in their use. Like other social historians trying to extract the humanity and lived experience of common or oppressed people Newman reads against the grain of his sources. Lucy Kaufman’s A People’s Reformation: Building the English Church in the Elizabethan Parish is another example of this methodology where the author plies out of church records the common people’s religious experience. It can also be seen in Mark Stoyle’s A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 where, due to the destruction of documents, the author purposefully questions of the bias and power dynamic of sources to bring to light the rebel perspective of the Prayer Book Rebellion. Newman aptly describes the need for this approach as “the words, the experiences, the motivations, the hopes and dreams of the freedom seekers themselves are largely absent from the archival record, and it requires contextual research and more than a little imagination to see the freedom seekers as individuals rather than as objects” (Newman, xxvii).
He pursues this humanizing goal through other methodological approaches as well. One of these is a very intentional use of language. Newman avoids using terms, even appropriate period words, which reinforce the dehumanizing, racist power dynamic of slavery (Newman, xi). For example, rather than ‘slave’ he uses ‘enslaved,’ but also chooses to still use the term ‘master’ as during the Restoration period it lacked later racial connotations. Focused, but impactful choices like this play an important part in bolstering Newman’s efforts to recover the oppressed subjects of Freedom Seekers.
Another methodological technique which Newman employs for this effect is his use of anecdotes and creative narrative. Where the archival sources fail to provide rich stories of the freedom seekers’ experiences Newman looks to fill that gap. He begins the monograph’s prologue with a vivid, imagined narrative of the enslaved person Ben’s attempt to escape from the merchant Theodore Johnson (Newman, xxi n1). This use of fiction to impress upon the reader a historical subject’s experience is unusual but striking in its success at humanizing Ben. Although uncommon, another example of it can be found in Jim Downs’ Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine which employs this imaginative approach from the methodological lens of Black Feminist Critique. Similarly, each of the twelve chapters in part two begins with a particular runaway advertisement and Newman’s attempt to give life and detail to the freedom seeker in question as much as possible. Criticism could be leveled at Newman for potentially reaching beyond what can be concretely gleamed from his sources about these individuals. However, such a critique would undermine the robust research and scholarly imaginativeness used by Newman to lift these forgotten people out of obscurity. Freedom Seekers is a brilliant piece of modern scholarship on slavery in the early British Empire and the humanity of its victims.