Slavery and Transatlantic Anti-Slave-Trade Sentiment in Quebec’s Newspapers, 1789–1793

Bird, Eleanor (2021) Slavery and Transatlantic Anti-Slave-Trade Sentiment in Quebec’s Newspapers, 1789–1793. Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 19 (4). pp. 387-407. ISSN 1479-4012

Abstract

There has been an emphasis on runaway slave advertisements in Quebec’s eighteenth-century newspapers as part of the recovery of Canada’s marginalised slaveholding past. However, as a close and holistic reading of the newspapers shows, the advertisements circulated alongside a higher number of texts relating to slavery in the wider Americas. The editors of the Quebec Gazette and the Montreal Gazette reprinted texts first published in Britain and France during the international slave-trade debates and from these they constructed a coherent local anti-slave-trade sentiment. Editors placed runaway slave advertisements alongside a general anti-slave-trade sentiment, and these contradictory texts circulated alongside one another. Canadian newspapers, their editors and readers were far more engaged with transatlantic slave-trade debates than has previously been understood.