Acknowledgements

Researching and writing this book felt like a homecoming. My parents were born and raised in the East End of London and during my childhood we regularly visited my grandparents in Stratford and Leytonstone. Moreover I have returned to seventeenth-century England, the subject that first drew me to the study of history. My interest was nurtured by my father and by two exceptional schoolteachers, the late Michael Thuell and John Tyson, both of St Joseph’s College in Ipswich. By the time I reached Princeton my interests had shifted to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North American history, but Lawrence Stone and John Murrin kept me interested in Stuart England, as did Richard S. Dunn at the University of Pennsylvania. The subject remained in focus during my tenure at the University of Glasgow through the great work of my colleagues in the Early Modern Work-in-Progress group, especially Alex Shepard, Don Spaeth and Lionel Glassey. Now, in the wake of my retirement from the University of Glasgow, I have come full circle and returned to the places and to the history that were so important to me nearly half a century ago.

I could not have researched and written this book without the resources and support of two remarkable institutions. The first is the Folger Institute of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. I spent the 2018–19 academic year as a Mowat Mellon Fellow at the Folger and was able to complete much of the research while enjoying access to the library’s magnificent collections. The research community at the Folger is wonderful and I am especially grateful to Amanda Herbert, Kathleen Lynch and Michael Witmore, as well as my cohort of fellows. While in Washington I was fortunate to be able to spend time with Alison Games, whom I first met when we were both starting our doctoral studies, and I am deeply grateful for her friendship and good cheer. I then spent the 2019–20 academic year as a Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This is a different kind of academic heaven, a group of humanities scholars all researching, writing and sharing ideas. Steve Nadler and Ann Harris have created a wonderful community, and I have been fortunate to remain in residence at the institute as an honorary fellow. The pandemic and politics threatened to derail this project but a supportive virtual writing group at the IRH helped me get through this: Andrea Harris, Laura McClure, Keren Omry, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Cherene Sherrard and Justine Walden have all become good friends, and their support and encouragement has made a huge difference. As I was completing the rewriting and editing of this book I was fortunate to participate in a virtual coffee house (organized by the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture) for writers focused on the lives of enslaved people. My co-host of our coffee-house table was Frances Bell and I am grateful to her and to the other participants for their insights, their enthusiasm and their good cheer.

I have been working on freedom-seeking enslaved people for quite a long time now, and a few scholars have added immeasurably to my knowledge and understanding of those who resisted enslavement. Foremost among these is my friend Billy G. Smith, a wonderful scholar and an even better human being, and I owe him more than I can ever repay. I am also very grateful to my colleagues on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Runaway Slaves in Britain: Bondage, Freedom and Race in the Eighteenth Century’. Stephen Mullen, Nelson Mundell and Roslyn Chapman have all helped shape my thinking about runaways, and I am particularly grateful to Nelson for all of his creative work on freedom seekers.

Over recent years I have been fortunate to work with artists, writers and cultural creators on the history of freedom seekers in early modern Britain. I have learned a great deal from these wonderfully creative people who take these histories to heart and do so well in bringing them to life for non-academic audiences. The actors and filmmakers Moyo Akandé and Morayo Akandé, the playwright May Sumbwanyambe and the graphic artists Warren Pleece and Sha Nazir are among those who have helped me imagine and understand the past in new ways, and I am tremendously grateful to them. With my Glasgow colleague Peggy Brunache, my friend Kate Birch (publisher of Ink Sweat & Tears) and Ruth Harrison (director of Spread the Word), I have developed my research into London freedom seekers for use by creative writers and artists of colour in London, and again I have learned a great deal in the process. One of these poems, by Abena Essah, sets the scene for this book, and I am grateful for the opportunity to feature this remarkable poem here. Most important of all is Anthony King, my friend since we first met at the age of ten. He is a skilled graphic designer who has helped me with some of the video maps in this book, but more than that he has enabled me to see how the visualization of historical data can yield new insights.

I presented earlier versions of part of this project to the scholarly communities at the Folger Institute, the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Early Modern Work-in-Progress group at the University of Glasgow, a virtual coffee-house writing table organized by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Thank you to all who have provided feedback, including the anonymous readers of this work. I am particularly grateful to Philip Carter, whose initial enthusiasm for my project has helped make this book possible. The Institute of Historical Research is at the forefront of digital historical publications and I am very grateful for all that they have done to help make this a better book, especially Jamie Bowman, Robert Davies and Lauren De’ath. I particularly appreciate the skilled copy-editing of Jacqueline Harvey.

I am grateful to the many historians of slavery whose friendship and scholarship have helped and inspired me. There are too many to mention but an abbreviated list must include Trevor Burnard and Richard Dunn, as well as Roderick McDonald, Jennifer Morgan, Vincent Brown, James Sweet, Marisa Fuentes, Lissa Bollettino, Hilary Beckles, Gloria Whiting, Christine Whyte and Peggy Brunache. Peter Elmer provided me with data from his research into London’s parish records, and Laurence Ward of the London Metropolitan Archives kindly shared data from the ‘Switching the Lens’ dataset. Jason McElligott shared primary sources and drafts of his unpublished work on mid-seventeenth-century newsbooks. I am particularly grateful to Mr Tony Berrett for sharing his notes of advertisements I had yet to locate.

I thank all of my family members for their interest, support and encouragement, and I am especially grateful to my niece Triona Lawrence, who produced illustrations of the freedom seekers whose stories I have focused on, helping me to see the people I was writing about. And then there is Marina Moskowitz, one of the most imaginative historians I have ever met. She supports, encourages and inspires me, and I am incomplete without her love and friendship, our shared laughter, cooking and so much more. This book is for her.

Figure 1. Wenceslaus Hollar, ‘London: The Long View’ (1647), Folger Shakespeare Library.