Documenting Runaway Slaves in the British Caribbean: Sources, Methods, and Uses

This paper will draw on several datasets of runaway slaves that the author has compiled from the British Caribbean, including the Bahamas, British Guianas, Dominica, and Jamaica, numbering some 8,000 individual slaves, to show how documenting runaway slaves is a particularly useful way to understand slavery, slave resistance, and the historical experiences of the enslaved in particular times and places. The paper will evaluate these materials as primary sources, and will also consider various methods for utilizing them, and the many interpretive uses to which they may be put. The major conclusion is that these sources, though singularly rich in their potential for elucidating individual as well as collective experience, are still so widely scattered and uncompiled (including even in North America) that there is a compelling need for collaborative research to systematically assemble and disseminate them. A systematic, collaborative effort to document runaway slaves throughout the Americas, including for the British Caribbean, will bring these richly descriptive primary sources to a wider use by historians and other scholars.