About the author

Simon P. Newman is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Glasgow and is currently a research fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin. He has published widely on early modern Atlantic World and American/Caribbean history. His most recent book A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (2013) investigated the English and West African origins of plantation slavery in Barbados and beyond. Over the past decade he has been investigating enslaved people who resisted by escaping, both in the Caribbean and the British Isles, resulting in articles in the English Historical Review and the William and Mary Quarterly, and a major database Runaway Slaves in Britain: bondage, freedom and race in the eighteenth century. He has also worked with playwrights, film-makers, creative writers, composers and others in Britain who are presenting this history to broad public audiences. In 2018 he commissioned and helped create the graphic novel Freedom Bound: Escaping Slavery in Scotland which is now being used in schools across Scotland. In the same year he co-authored the University of Glasgow’s report into its links to slavery, and helped create the reparative justice programme that followed.