London Gazette England 1707/British Library; For Sale Covent Garden Journal London 1752/British Library
A slave advert and an announcement searching for a fugitive slave, both found in eighteenth-century British newspapersLondon Gazette England 1707/British Library; For Sale Covent Garden Journal London 1752/British LibraryOver the last three years, researchers at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have identified more than 800 articles about fugitive slaves published in British newspapers between 1700 and 1780. They also found 80 slave-sale advertisements in the London Gazette and the London Journal, which are archived in institutions such as the British Library and the Liverpool Central Library. The team used their findings to create the Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Britain project, which was opened to the public in July this year and shows that trading slaves was once common in the UK. Available online, the database offers complete transcripts of the adverts, and in some cases, visual reproductions. Simon Newman, a professor at the University of Glasgow and coordinator of the project, specializes in US history and the Atlantic slave trade. In June, he told online journal Quartz that the findings challenge the idea that the transatlantic slave trade occurred mainly in the Caribbean, the Americas, and South Asia. Many of the adverts refer to Afro-descendants, but there are others related to Indian and Native American slaves. The documents describe the clothing, hairstyles, and skills of the slaves and include evidence that some joined churches, were baptized, or married to Europeans. The plan is to create didactic material based on the documents, to teach people about this rarely discussed aspect of local history. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, and in the USA in 1865.
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