Chapter 4 is an extensive study of runaway slave advertisements that mention that a slave speaks Dutch. For this chapter, I have compiled a database of 487 enslaved persons, coded by year of flight, name, age, Dutch language ability, name of master, county, and original source. I demonstrate that runaway slave advertisements in New York City and environs plateaued in the period 1760–1800, but peaked later in the Hudson Valley, with exceptional growth in the 1790s and 1800s. The data provide evidence for the persistence of the Dutch language in New York and New Jersey and contribute to a picture of Dutch-speaking slaves presenting a sharp economic challenge to the institution of slavery. By the 1790s, Dutch-speaking slaves were running away at a rate of at least 1 per 500 per year. For Dutch slave owners, this meant a significant loss of capital and, moreover, a risk on their remaining slave capital. Runaway slaves tended to be prime working-age males, and the loss of the best field workers frustrated New York Dutch farmers. The pressure of runaway activity also lowered the value of retained slaves and made New York slavery more costly in general. Runaways put pressure on slaveholders to manumit their slaves, extracting the most labor possible from them before agreeing to let them go.

This chapter introduces slavery during the three centuries of Ptolemaic rule in Egypt for which papyri, recycled in mummy casing or discovered archived together, provide a wealth of texts in both Greek and Egyptian Demotic. Greek settlers brought a developed form of slavery to Egypt. Traditional forms of dependence, however, continued in domestic as in temple contexts, where sacred slaves were dedicated to a god. The terminology of slavery is scrutinised and Greek city law codes examined for information on slaves. The third-century BC archive of Zenon provides many details on where slaves came from and how they were acquired. Slaves are mainly found in a domestic context but there is some evidence for workshop employment, especially in textiles; evidence for their use in agriculture is minimal. To gain their freedom slaves might benefit from testamentary grants but running away was the more usual method.

Chapter 5 examines the gendered dimensions of maroon communities in America and the wider Atlantic world. Fugitive women joined maroon societies with their husbands and other family members. Runaways were a constant source of anxiety and fear. In the Caribbean and places such as Georgia, Florida, and the Gulf Coast and along the perimeter of the Virginia and North Carolina border in an area known as the Great Dismal Swamp, they were successful in establishing maroon societies. Such societies maintained their cohesiveness for many years. Given that the woods and swamps were spaces where the enslaved could exercise more autonomy than the fields and other open spaces on the plantation, fugitive women had more freedom in these spaces. The Revolutionary War not only prompted an increase in the number of runaways, but also provided the impetus for marronage.

Chapter 1 provides an analysis of the status and position of enslaved women during the eighteenth century. The daily and seasonal work of enslaved women determined the boundaries within which women had to resist their bondage and their opportunities to do so. This chapter provides a broad understanding of enslaved women’s labor in the Southern and Northern colonies as a basis from which to further examine enslaved women’s fugitivity in subsequent chapters. This chapter demonstrates the diversity in enslaved women’s experiences during the eighteenth century and the gendered resistance strategies they pursued to contest their bondage. Despite the limitations placed on enslaved women’s resistance, they were able to contest their bondage through the liminal spaces of slavery. This contestation had significant consequences for their mobility and the actions that they pursued as slavery became entrenched during the eighteenth century.

This chapter emphasizes actions at the regional scale, specifically the West Coast hip neighborhoods of the Bay Area during the 1960s. The runaway crisis of the late 1960s and the People’s Park standoff in 1969 are the focus of this chapter, which explores the role that “the West” and “nature” each played in the counterculture imagination and in the emergence of the popular ecology movement on the streets of Berkeley. This chapter stresses again the more intimate scale of the body and the influence that mobile, sometimes sick, and recalcitrant youth bodies played in the remaking of public space and ideas of autonomy as youth and their adult allies fought for “the right to the city.” The flood of rootless, placeless teens in public space, parks, and new “youth ghettos” forced local municipal renegotiations of young people’s legal status, contributing to broad national changes to the very meanings of youth, youth public health accommodation, and environmental activism during a decade marked by such contests.

Couple beggars were unattached clergymen who performed marriages for payment in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Ireland. The term ‘couple beggar’ was used to refer to a diverse range of men.It included Catholic priests, Church of Ireland ministers and Presbyterian ministers. A marriage conducted by a clergyman ordained by a bishop was legal under most circumstances. Most couple beggars had fallen out with their respective churches for a variety of offences usually involving women or alcohol.Some couple beggars continued to hold official clerical positions but were not averse to marrying couples privately for cash payments.The popularity of couple beggars in Ireland before 1850 was a natural corollary to the absence of statute law defining how, where and by whom a marriage should be celebrated.Many couple beggars developed a flourishing business particularly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when there was considerable ambiguity around what constituted a legally valid marriage.The Marriage Ireland Act of 1844 and its amendment put Church of Ireland and Presbyterian couple beggars out of business because it specified that marriages presided over by a Church of Ireland or Presbyterian minister must take place in a church or meeting house registered with the newly appointed Registrar.

Abduction can be described as the practice of carrying off a woman with the purpose of compelling her to marry a particular man who would then have access to the available dowry of money, land or other property, tied to the woman.Abduction was a noted phenomenon of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, within the context of the history of marriage in Ireland, reflects the desire, and in some cases the ability, of couples to overcome parental decisions on their marriage partners, but perhaps primarily the desire among individuals and families for property and status that was achievable through marriage.Abduction was most often a crime of considerable terror and violence and it is worth exploring for what it says about marriage strategy, attitudes to marriage, consent, parental authority and property, women’s agency in choosing a marriage partner and the value of women in Irish society. Abduction in Ireland between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries was a common practice.In this chapter we examine the motives behind, and assess reactions, to abductions, including the role of the family and wider community in this often very violent enterprise.