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No Safe Haven: Fugitives from Slavery as Contested Refugees in Hamburg, 1770–1840

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2026

Annika Bärwald Open the ORCID record for Annika Bärwald [Opens in a new window]
Annika Bärwald*
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Department of History, University of Bremen, Germany
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Email: a.baerwald@uni-bremen.de
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Abstract

This paper traces enslaved people’s attempts at staking out liberty in Hamburg and attendant reactions by Hamburg inhabitants and authorities. It argues that in the decades before Hamburg’s anti-slavery laws were passed in 1837, treatment of people of African and Asian descent intersected strongly with ever-stricter alien laws. Based on extensive research in archival sources as well as newspapers and other printed material, the article contains two parts: First, it examines Hamburg’s few existent traces of attempted flights from slavery, pointing to conditions of escape and recapture. Second, the paper links these findings to Hamburg’s legal history leading up to its 1837 anti-slave-trade law, examining alien legislation, poor relief regulations, and domestic workers’ legislation. It also highlights how these policies affected individual lives. In combining legal historical and micro-historical/prosopographical approaches, the paper contributes to studies of Black German history, free soil policies, and questions around the policing of aliens.

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Itinerario , First View , pp. 1 - 17
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Leiden Institute for History.

Introduction

In June 1774, a curious advertisement appeared in a Hamburg newspaper stating that “yesterday night at 10 ½, a young Negro around 14 years of age, small in posture [had] in all likelihood been abducted.”Footnote 1 The advertisement went on to promise anyone who could volunteer information anonymity and a “good recompense.”Footnote 2 They should, for that purpose, come to the Kaisershof, a well-known hotel. The advertisement’s language appears to be deliberately vague. Had the youth of African descent in fact been kidnapped and the advertisement was to signal a willingness to pay ransom? This is not entirely implausible, since youthful (and often enslaved) employees of African descent were still very much sought after at noble courts.Footnote 3 Or had the fourteen-year-old in fact attempted to flee an existing enslavement? The latter seems more likely, as a textbook published nine years later described a very similar scenario. The protagonist here was Jan, an enslaved person who had accompanied his owner from the Dutch colony of Suriname. The escape attempt itself is only described in a few words: “Once, it occurred to black Jan to flee his master. – But his colour betrayed him. – He was easily caught and sent back.”Footnote 4

The 1774 advertisement and the 1783 description may or may not refer to the same incident. What unites them is that in neither case the attempted flight (or kidnapping) seems to have been successful. This is suggested by the fact that the 1774 advertisement – in contrast to many others pertaining to jobs, goods to sell, and even criminals on the run – was not reprinted a second time. In the textbook, the author makes the fugitive’s recapture explicit. After drawing a connection between Jan’s skin colour and his capture, he goes on to voice moral distress about the incident since, in a conversation, the “cold-blooded” and “tyrannical” plantation owner had made it clear that he would send Jan back to Suriname to have one of his legs “cut off.”Footnote 5 “Poor Jan!” the narrator exclaims, to be so punished for “seeking what every human rightfully deserves – freedom.”Footnote 6 Jan’s flight attempt had elicited two kinds of responses: willing cooperation in the fugitive’s retrieval and moral condemnation from some who witnessed the incident.

Seeking freedom from slavery in late eighteenth-century Hamburg, one may presume, was a rare and difficult feat to accomplish. On some level this is surprising: Hamburg was a republican city within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and prided itself in its status as a free, self-governed city.Footnote 7 It boasted a significant tradition of sheltering fugitives from serfdom and of insuring sailors against Barbary captivity.Footnote 8 Hamburg’s inhabitants’ intense preoccupation with the latter also fed into an overall intellectual anti-slavery tradition.Footnote 9 This tradition eroded toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, when Hamburg inhabitants began to participate more openly in colonial commerce as well as in the transatlantic slave trade.Footnote 10 Increasingly, sailors, merchants, soldiers, settlers, and missionaries, from the Hamburg region but also from other German-speaking territories became involved in early modern colonialism.Footnote 11 Consequently, when Hamburg and its environs saw an influx of free and enslaved people of non-European descent around the turn of the nineteenth century, it was not a place of refuge for most of them, no proverbial safe haven.

Drawing on findings from my dissertation project on people of African, Asian, and Native American descent in the Hamburg area from 1760 to 1840, this article argues that two mechanisms emerged regarding the policing of fugitives from slavery and people of non-European descent more generally: The first was a tacit toleration of slavery and a willingness of (parts of) Hamburg’s population to cooperate with enslavers. The second and interlocking mechanism was the classification of many non-European people as undesirable foreigners and their subsequent subjection to alien laws. These policies and attendant practices, I argue, operated well before Hamburg’s official abolition of slavery and the declaration of the city territory as free soil were passed in June 1837.Footnote 12 While Hamburg thus did not develop an encompassing policy for regulating enslavement and policing people of African and Asian descent, existing interlocking policies were used to regulate status, movement, and residency of non-European people in Hamburg and beyond.Footnote 13

In the following, I build on three interconnected strands of research. First, there is the blossoming field of studies of people of African (and to a lesser degree Asian) descent in early modern and early nineteenth-century Europe. Long viewed as an intra-imperial phenomenon found predominantly along metropolis-colony axes, recent studies have pointed to the presence of people of non-European descent in seemingly peripheral regions and cities outside of colonial realms. Because the German speaking territories did not, save for a few exceptions, become formal colonial powers until the 1880s,Footnote 14 German historiography has tended to focus on Black and often enslaved servants at well-connected noble courts, centring questions of representation as well as of assimilation or marginalization.Footnote 15 Only in the last decade has scholarly attention shifted toward studies of, among other themes, agency and community, global religious belonging, and the acceptance of slavery as a legal category within German jurisprudence.Footnote 16 It should be noted in this context that, due to the German-speaking territories’ political fragmentation, laws on slavery, or the absence thereof, varied widely.Footnote 17 Despite a growing interest in Hamburg’s colonial past, systematic studies examining the city’s legal traditions around slavery and enslaved people have not yet been conducted.Footnote 18

Second, this article is indebted to scholarship on slavery and free-soil regulations, i.e., laws that formally freed enslaved people upon setting foot in a specific territory. As Sue Peabody, Keila Grinberg, Damian Pargas, and others have argued, free-soil laws were a crucial legal mechanism that altered global slavery geographies and could turn cities, islands, and countries into places of refuge.Footnote 19 They existed in both the Americas and Europe as well as in other regions.Footnote 20 Given the fact that free-soil territories offered varying degrees of protection, Pargas has suggested differentiating spaces of “semi-formal” and “formal” freedom, along with “informal” spaces of refuge in which asylum was not legally sanctioned.Footnote 21 Where they did exist in Europe, free-soil laws often bridged a gap between colonial and metropolitan legal systems.Footnote 22 Their application varied and frequently depended on individuals’ ability to claim their freedom in court, requiring resources, networks, and perseverance.Footnote 23 Sue Peabody has argued that free-soil regulations balanced ideas of safeguarding property rights while preventing the spread of the legal category of slavery which was seen as alien to local laws.Footnote 24 In the United Kingdom, too, free soil became an accepted legal principle only after the precedent Somerset case of 1772, in which an African man, together with abolitionist partners, contested his re-enslavement and abduction to the Caribbean.Footnote 25

Third, I draw on scholarship examining broader laws targeting aliens and restricting residency rights of foreigners, particularly those issued during the Age of Revolutions. Jan C. Jansen has argued that the high number of alien laws passed in many Atlantic territories at the time was a reaction to the contemporaneous surge of refugees and persons displaced by the French and Haitian Revolutions.Footnote 26 Repercussions were felt across Europe but also in several regions in the Americas.Footnote 27 Viewed more broadly, laws and regulations put in place in this period were not just about the right to remain but also about access to services, to relief funds, and to rights attached to the evolving category of citizenship.Footnote 28 In other words, they were about who could claim asylum and under what circumstances. Although more global in dimension, alien laws were therefore connected to older poor laws, which frequently limited access to poor relief to parishioners or long-time residents of a town.Footnote 29 In conjunction, both formed a common basis for expulsion and transportation practices.

Focusing on Hamburg and its interactions with and regulation of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, this article is divided into two parts. The first part contains a close reading of four runaway advertisements documenting attempted flights from slavery in Hamburg and Altona. My analysis focuses on residents’ cooperation with enslavers and the small Black population as two reasons why Hamburg – in contrast to other port cities – did not become a place of “informal freedom.” The second part is dedicated to Hamburg’s legal framework regarding slavery and the policing of aliens. It examines the interconnection between Hamburg’s anti-slavery laws of 1837 and its juridical traditions pertaining to foreigners in the seven decades prior. Based on Hamburg registers of foreign workers as well as inmate and patient registers, I also trace interactions between Hamburg authorities and non-European people, both free and enslaved. Thinking about these sources together – runaway advertisements, legislation, and policing practices – makes visible their interrelatedness and gives a fuller picture of the stakes involved in claiming freedom in and around Hamburg.

Fleeing Slavery

I have found a total of only five probable runaway advertisements for the Hamburg area in the years 1768 to 1840, all of them clustered in the late eighteenth century, through combined manual and full-text research in four prominent Hamburg and Altona newspapers, accompanied by one 1807 case documented in Port of Philadelphia crew lists.Footnote 30 Though perhaps only partially reflecting the total number of such advertisements in the region, the quantity of only five is small, paling in comparison with the 212 London cases Simon Newman has documented for the years 1655 to 1704, let alone the numbers of such advertisements found in the Americas.Footnote 31 Still, given the relatively recent turn to slavery studies in Germany, flight attempts by enslaved people in the German-speaking territories have rarely been addressed at all, with German-language runaway advertisements barely mentioned.Footnote 32 For Hamburg and Altona, where no freedom suits seem to have been brought forth in courts, these advertisements provide a lens through which mechanisms of flight and retrieval become visible, allowing for a glimpse into the pathways of enslaved people to and from the Hamburg region and for a preliminary assessment of impediments to their escape.

An advertisement published at the turn of the year 1787 paints a vivid picture:

A Negro or black boy escaped from a house in Altona last night. He is about 20 years old, of stocky build, and at the time of his escape was wearing a blue short frock-coat with a red collar, along with a grey Bergen op Zoom overcoat and a round hat. He speaks English and German. Since the owner is anxious to have him back, anyone who knows of him is requested to report to the Adreß-Comtoir and can expect a good reward. Altona, December 30, 1786.Footnote 33

Strikingly, enslavement is not made explicit here. Rather, it is established casually via the term “owner,” the reward offered, and the phrase “escape.”Footnote 34 The man’s appearance is described in detail; he was dressed well and, since he spoke both German and English, might have been able to find his way around Hamburg and Altona independently.

As a territory, Altona technically fell under a different jurisdiction than Hamburg. The Danish-Norwegian kingdom had, by 1786, expanded into a significant colonial empire encompassing large enslaved populations.Footnote 35 Despite this fact, Danish-Norwegian law only began regulating slavery on European soil in the 1790s, attempting to limit the time enslaved people were allowed to reside in Denmark-Norway to a year.Footnote 36 Such limitations were not implemented thoroughly, however, and court cases from the following years make clear that freedom was far from guaranteed.Footnote 37 The Altona fugitive who escaped in December 1786 thus probably had slim chances of claiming his freedom in court. As is the case for all four advertisements, the short text pertaining to his flight was published only once, suggesting – though not proving – that he may have been caught and returned to his enslaver.

Domestic workers were not the only ones fleeing from slavery, though. Three other advertisements, published in 1795, 1796, and 1797, pertained to persons working aboard North American ships. Here, too, enslavement was not clearly stated but can be inferred from details in the texts as well as from the circumstances of their publication. The most important context is that missing sailor advertisements were otherwise almost unheard of in the Hamburg region, probably because deserters could easily be replaced in a city full of maritime labourers. The absence of such advertisements is striking in itself since Intelligenzblätter, newspapers containing all kinds of business information and short announcements, were widely read and distributed in the region.Footnote 38 In contrast to seeking employment or ship’s passages via newspaper advertisements, selling and buying items, or warning of criminals, offering a reward for deserted sailors remained highly unusual.

Such a reward, however, was offered by a US captain searching for an absconding man:

From the board of the American ship, Fair American of New York, a Negro, named Bob, has escaped; he is about 5 feet 9 inches in height, has lost his front teeth and stutters very much, was wearing, as he escaped, a short blue jacket and long pants, and a round hat. Whoever can give some news of him will receive a reward of 5 guineas, and is requested to report to Henry Tredwell, captain of the aforementioned ship.

Hamburg, February 22, 1796.Footnote 39

Notably, the wanted man is listed without a last name, Bob’s appearance suggests that he worked as a sailor. The brief text also notes blemishes such as missing teeth and a stutter. Despite those, the captain considered Bob valuable enough to promise five guineas for his recovery, a sum roughly equivalent to 35 days’ wages of a skilled tradesman. The fugitive, one may conclude, was of immense personal value to him.Footnote 40 Given that the employment of enslaved African American sailors was not uncommon, it seems fair to assume that Bob had in fact attempted to flee from slavery.Footnote 41

This impression is strengthened by the fact that similar advertisements appeared in the preceding and the following year. In November 1795, Captain Samuel Parker had an advertisement published stating that “two Moors, one a sailor, Newport Hafard, the other a cook, William Davids” had “secretly absconded” from his ship, the Mary. He did not include a physical description of the two men, but promised “a reward of ten marks to whoever can get hold of these two Moors and bring them to safety,” further adding that the “other expenses involved will also be willingly paid.”Footnote 42 Employing the term “safety” in this context of the recapture and possible re-enslavement of two people who had absconded out of their own volition may have either been a deliberate effort to distort reality or allude to an understanding of safety not centred on personal liberty.

Similar yet different was the 1797 advertisement that stated that “two boys, one black and one white, had escaped”Footnote 43 from the American ship named Lucy without permission. The text continued with a rather detailed description of both: “The first one, named Tom Millom, is 5 feet 2 inches tall, wears a blue jacket with white buttons, sailcloth pants, and bound hair, he has a flat nose and large mouth, his neck [is] smeared with tar.” The white fugitive, “William Franks,” was described as being slightly taller, but “his clothes … were like those of the first.” The two had likely escaped together, perhaps forming a bond of solidarity that transcended racial ascriptions. It is unclear whether Millom’s tar-smeared neck was the result of him having recently been punished.Footnote 44 Despite Millom’s and Frank’s similar position, the advertisement clearly distinguished between the two, stating that “whoever delivers them [Millom and Franks] to the captain on board the said ship, shall receive for the former 10 Spec. Thaler, and for the latter 1 Spec. Thaler reward.”Footnote 45 The captain thus set the sum for finding Tom Millom tenfold higher than for William Franks. The most plausible explanation is Millom’s enslavement and the value that was to be gained from his retrieval, whereas Franks may have been wanted primarily as Millom’s accomplice.

One more case of attempted flight from slavery by a sailor is documented within the crew lists filed at the Port of Philadelphia from 1803 onward.Footnote 46 In 1807, eighteen-year-old James Chamberlain was a member of the Perseverance’s crew. Born in Maryland, he was described as “an indentured black man to Henry Moulier of Philad[elphi]a.” Indenture had been written into law in Pennsylvania with the 1780 “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.” Any child born to an enslaved mother after that date would be temporarily indentured until the age of 28.Footnote 47 Chamberlain, the crew lists stated, went “to Sea with his master[’]s approbation.” He sported “black hair hewn on the top of his head.” When the ship reached Friedrichstadt, a small port near Hamburg chosen because of the blockade of Hamburg’s harbour, Chamberlain “deserted from said vessel” and “could not afterward be found.” The Perseverance eventually sailed to Philadelphia without him, suggesting the possibility that the young man had in fact gained liberty a full ten years before he would have become free by Pennsylvania law.Footnote 48

Notably, all these flight attempts took place during a time of heightened criticism of slavery and increasing efforts to abolish the slave trade. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, anti-slavery ideas – propagated by both white and Black activists across the Atlantic – gained traction and resulted, among other things, in the 1792 Danish decision to abolish Atlantic slave trading within a ten-year time span.Footnote 49 The French and especially the Haitian Revolution had marked further caesurae, permanently or temporarily establishing territories in the Americas in which slavery was abolished.Footnote 50 In North America, where informal places of freedom had existed before, northern states, but also Canada and Mexico, began to proscribe slavery, resulting in rising numbers of refugees in these territories.Footnote 51 Similarly, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Haiti and other regions offered (conditional) freedom to refugees and became destinations for what Neville Hall has termed maritime marronage: places of freedom reachable for enslaved sailors absconding from ships.Footnote 52

Hamburg was not this kind of place. Though there had, in fact, been German-speaking critics of slavery early on,Footnote 53 the 1790s and 1800s (up until 1806 when French troops occupied Hamburg) were marked by a heretofore unknown scale of participation in the transatlantic slave trade. Transporting enslaved people to the Danish colonies became particularly lucrative when the Danish crown rescinded all mercantilist restriction for the ten-year span before the trade’s abolition.Footnote 54 Yet, even before this phase, public opinion on the morality of slavery and the slave trade had been far from unanimous in Hamburg. In a 1784 Hamburg newspaper article, physician Adolph Friedrich Löffler reported from his work aboard a slave ship, arguing, in an apologetic tone, that the slave trade brought “thousands from one country where they are a burden … to another … where they are made useful people.”Footnote 55 The above-cited Sinapius, too, who presented himself as deeply moved by the fate of enslaved Jan, had in the same volume printed a model calculation for the outfitting of a slave ship, only thinly distancing himself from this commerce.Footnote 56 At the same time, a growing number of Hamburg merchants abroad now enslaved people themselves, accounting for part of the influx of people of African descent into the region.Footnote 57

Perhaps aware of this, some refugees waited for more favourable circumstances at different ports before attempting to flee. This, at least, was the case for James Perry, an enslaved person who was had been rented out to serve as a cook on a Hamburg-bound ship in 1802. Perry’s monthly wages of $20 would be paid out to the Hay family in Baltimore who legally owned him. When he arrived in Hamburg, the vessel Perry had been hired on was sold and he was transferred onto a different ship bound for Baltimore. Due to unfavourable winds, however, this second ship steered toward the harbour of an unnamed island in the Atlantic, where the enslaved cook promptly and permanently escaped. The Hay family later sued the captain for the wages lost through his escape. Perry, it appears, had judged the situation correctly: Rather than absconding in Hamburg, he had waited for his chance to escape on what was likely a Caribbean island, where he had good chances of blending in with the local free Black population.Footnote 58

What is remarkable about the attempted cases of flight that did take place in Hamburg is thus not just their scarcity but also the fact that authorities seemed not to have been involved in them at all, neither in the retrieval of fugitives nor as protective instances.Footnote 59 Instead, enslavers were able to search for probable fugitives from slavery quite openly by using the local newspaper system, promising rewards for recaptures, and only thinly veiling the enslaved status of the fugitives. Though not much is known about the process of recapture, there must have been some Hamburg inhabitants willingly aiding enslavers in finding and reenslaving refugees. The lack of a substantial Black community probably facilitated recaptures. As studies for the Americas have shown, such communities were crucial in providing cover for fugitives in places of “informal freedom.”Footnote 60 Furthermore, abolitionist infrastructure in and around Hamburg was scarce and public opinion on slavery quite ambiguous. People fleeing from slavery might have struggled to pass for free while also having few chances of meeting abolitionist lawyers or activists willing to take up their cases. Only in 1839 would a Hamburg anti-slavery association form, and even this was short-lived.Footnote 61 Moreover, as will be explored below, until 1837 no legal mechanism existed here that would have clearly allowed enslaved people to claim asylum. Rather, a network of alien and servant legislation severely circumscribed foreigners’ – and formerly enslaved persons’ – rights to reside in the city. Hence, even when enslaved people succeeded in freeing themselves, they would face difficulties in transforming their status to that of a recognised refugee, let alone one of belonging in the city.Footnote 62

Free Soil and Its Limitations

Hamburg’s 1837 “Criminal Statute against the Slave Trade” was not uncontroversial. Ratified thirty years after the British Slavery Abolition Act and thirty-four years after the Danish slave trade abolition, it was in large part a concession to Hamburg’s French and British trading partners.Footnote 63 Some historians have argued that Hamburg elites, particularly the Commerzdeputation (an advisory board in economic matters) had deliberately slowed down and even opposed the accession to the treaty. Concrete evidence for this is scarce. The Commerzdeputation had referred to the agreement as disadvantageous “from a purely commercial point of view”Footnote 64 but had nevertheless recommended its ratification.Footnote 65

Whether its hesitation was due to wanting to protect Hamburg slave trade participation or whether the Commerzdeputation simply sought to shield the emerging legal trade with West Africa is hard to gauge and requires further study. A comparison with the city of Bremen is instructive, though. As Jasper Hagedorn has shown, in the neighbouring city attempts to outlaw slavery and the slave trade had failed in 1815. Even in the 1830s, Bremen’s government had waited for Hamburg and Lübeck to initiate legislation before it followed suit. Still, the law was only ratified when lawmakers promised to usher certificates vouching for the harmlessness of certain equipment stored on board.Footnote 66 In both cities, accusations of slave trade against local ship owners subsequently caused great moral outrage, with local discourse honing in on the idea that the British used slave trade accusations as a subterfuge to monopolize commerce with Africa.Footnote 67

Hamburg, in fact, passed two laws regarding slavery and the slave trade in the summer of 1837. One was the lengthy agreement treat with France and Great Britain signed in unison with the Hanseatic cities of Lübeck and Bremen, the other was a brief law specific to Hamburg. The former, called the “Accession Treaty … for a more Effective Suppression of the Slave Trade,” aside from its main stated purpose, specified terms of freedom for formerly enslaved people. Article IX stipulated that any enslaved person found aboard a slaving vessel would obtain his or her “immediate freedom” after a court had confirmed a case of slave trade. The law also stated that “for the good of these slaves themselves, they [the treaty’s signatories] reserve the right to employ them as domestics, or free labourers, according to their respective laws.”Footnote 68 While this ruling thus affirmed the intent to liberate captives, it also circumscribed their scope of action. Pre-emptively, all three cities negotiated that enslaved people found on board slave ships would, if possible, not be brought to their respective harbours but instead be transported to a nearby French or British (colonial) harbour.Footnote 69

The second law passed in 1837 was specific to Hamburg and explicitly addressed the possible presence of enslaved people in the city. It contained a free-soil clause: “Any slave or prisoner of war treated as such [i.e., as a slave] shall become free the moment he enters the territory of Hamburg. Violence or ill-treatment committed against him shall be regarded and punished as if it had been committed against a free man.”Footnote 70 The law’s enactment mirrored developments across the Atlantic: With the abolition of slavery, British Atlantic colonies had joined the formal spaces of freedom emerging in the Americas.Footnote 71 Notably, a free-soil regulation almost identical to Hamburg’s was passed in Lübeck only a month later – where the clause applied even to Lübeck ships – but was omitted in Bremen.Footnote 72

As the Accession Treaty implied, freedpeople would be granted rights equal to that of a “free man” and thus be protected from re-enslavement. They would not, however, thereby receive the status of citizens or denizens. Instead, they would presumably be subjected to the multiple local regulations pertaining to foreigners and domestic labourers. Linked to questions of eligibility for aid and welfare, this tightening legal system around policing aliens and domestic workers at the turn of the nineteenth century therefore merits closer examination.

Like those of many European cities, Hamburg’s welfare system had long relied on the exclusion and expulsion of non-native-born persons, occasionally even singling out minorities such as Romani people and Jews.Footnote 73 With the establishment of Hamburg’s reformed Poor Relief system in 1788 and with the increased influx of French émigrés, however, such regulations became stricter and were reissued at shorter intervals. In fact, the chronically underfunded Poor Relief system largely relied on separating supposed deserving from undeserving poor, a system in which foreign-born people were regularly deemed ineligible.Footnote 74 The 1788 “New Poor Law” which accompanied the introduction of the Poor Relief system therefore outlawed offering room and board to strangers whom hosts “in the least suspect[ed] could one day be a burden to the public.”Footnote 75 Inn-keepers were to immediately notify the newly installed Armen-Pfleger (caretakers of the poor) of such guests so that the former could decide on further steps.Footnote 76

The 1791 amendment to this law, too, differentiated between poor people arriving before 1788 and those who had arrived later. From now on, the late arrivals were excluded categorically from receiving aid and were to be exiled immediately by the Armen-Polizey (police of the poor). Hosts who took up poor foreigners were threatened with a two Reichsthaler penalty and were obliged to contribute to housing or funerary costs that might arise, a warning that was frequently reissued in the following decades.Footnote 77 Nine further laws were passed and reissued countless times between 1774 and 1840 aiming at restricting residency of foreigners, particularly poor people and mendicants.Footnote 78 The 1790s, which saw an influx of refugees from revolutionary France, proved another turning point. Initially welcoming the strangers, Hamburg legislators eventually changed course and, in September 1797, ruled that “in the future, no further people emigrating from their homeland should be admitted.”Footnote 79 To ensure the law’s efficacy, the Senate also instructed gatekeepers to increase controls and declared that strangers “who come here in groups or in torn clothes or poor circumstances, are not to be allowed to pass, but are to be turned back immediately.”Footnote 80 Hamburg was, quite literally, closing its gates.Footnote 81

In the early to mid-nineteenth century, the legislative focus shifted to the (foreign-born) working poor, especially to domestic and to some degree maritime workers.Footnote 82 An 1818 law, for example, threatened domestic workers with incarceration for offenses such as going out without a permission or seeking new employment.Footnote 83 In 1829, a comprehensive system of registering foreign-born domestic and menial workers was installed and was formalized in 1833. It demanded that all foreign-born Gesinde (i.e., domestic labourers, journeymen, and others) be registered at an office created for that purpose. There, they would receive limited-time residency cards (Aufenthaltskarten) that could be withdrawn when workers became unemployed.Footnote 84 The threat of deportation was explicitly included in the letter of the law, as the 1833 regulation stated that “the police chief is also authorized to have any unemployed alien removed from the city immediately.”Footnote 85

It is difficult to assess to what degree these regulations affected formerly enslaved people. The fact that enslavement and former enslavement are usually unmarked in Hamburg sources constitutes a major historiographic challenge in this context. What can be traced, however, is the effect on Hamburg’s foreign working population of non-European descent. In the first six years of the foreign workers registries, at least thirteen such persons were documented.Footnote 86 In the massive volumes, they remained an absolute minority, with most workers coming from the region or, not infrequently, neighbouring European territories. Among the non-European workers registered, some – like Anna Maria, who hailed from the Caribbean island of St. Thomas and was listed without a last name in 1836 – arrived within circular labour arrangements and stayed in Hamburg only for a short while, leaving with the same employer or – not unlikely – enslaver.Footnote 87

Others, however, were clearly affected by Hamburg’s strict residency laws. Twenty-year-old Johann Wilhelm Hall from “Africa,” for example, had worked in both Altona and Hamburg in hatmaker’s shops. Having lived in the latter city for two years, he lost his job in August 1839, resulting in his residency permit being annulled and him having to leave the city.Footnote 88 Similarly, Bernhard Lewis, a “servant” from Paramaribo, Suriname, had worked in Hamburg from 1833 to 1836 before becoming unemployed in August of that year. He appears to have struggled to find employment thereafter. His residency permit was “prolonged” several times for short intervals. An illness was noted in November of 1836. After a protracted process, he eventually left – or had to leave – the city in April 1837.Footnote 89 William Girando, too, was affected by the Hamburg laws. The African-born waiter arrived from the town of Dessau in May or June 1837, carrying a passport issued in Berlin. In September of the same year, he handed in his residency card in exchange for his passport and left Hamburg, only to return three years later for another half year.Footnote 90

There is a certain ambiguity in assessing these itinerant lives. Girando’s path, which included stops in Dessau, Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg, and likely various other places, might be indicative of workers of colour navigating the free labour market with some skill. As shown elsewhere, some people of colour who worked in Hamburg formed a highly mobile and often multilingual group who even used the newspaper system to tout their abilities as personal servants to travellers and other employers.Footnote 91 Nevertheless, the strictures of Hamburg’s residency laws underline that there was an involuntary side to highly mobile work biographies.Footnote 92 Making a living in the city was not easy and, for many, leaving the city was not a choice.

While servant legislation and registration largely relied on both the threat and the practice of exiling, city authorities also occasionally resorted to the more extreme measure of deportation, particularly in cases of perceived delinquency or extreme need.Footnote 93 Hamburg’s history of overseas deportation, usually in the form of convict transportation, cannot be explored here in detail, but it is worth noting that such transports took place as early as the 1750s, albeit irregularly.Footnote 94 Instances of deported individuals of African and Asian descent were not particularly numerous but ranged from the arguably benevolent to the punitive: between 1799 and 1810, for example, a group of as many as thirty-three Asian sailors had been stranded and found homeless in Hamburg before a ship was chartered to deport them to Bengal.Footnote 95 In another instance, an East African domestic worker who had lived in Hamburg since his childhood was sentenced to deportation for what appears to have be petty theft. He died a year into his incarceration before the deportation could take place.Footnote 96

More common than deportations were Hamburg authorities’ practices of expelling impoverished foreigners from its territories. Such expulsions had been practiced in Hamburg at least since the sixteenth century, targeting those who contravened the city’s rigid poor laws, which forbade begging, giving alms to mendicants, paid sex work, inebriety, and a number of other offences.Footnote 97 As evidenced both in police verdicts and workhouse records, foreign convicts and beggars were often expelled from the city after having served their sentence. A softer version consisted in them swearing not to return to the city for a certain period of time or for the rest of their lives. While I have found no evidence of this form expulsion directly affecting people of African or Asian descent, four of the seven US mariners incarcerated in the work house between 1799 and 1810, were either made to swear to leave the city and its territories or were kept imprisoned until they could be put aboard a ship.Footnote 98 Removal, these instances highlight, was not just an empty threat, but enforced by police officials and carceral authorities on a daily basis.

Thinking of Hamburg’s anti-slavery legislation in conjunction with its policing of aliens and domestic workers as well as its practices of deportation and expulsion highlights free-soil laws’ limitations. Although radical on paper, Hamburg’s free-soil law came relatively late and, by delegating freedpeople to domestic service positions, offered them few economic opportunities. Furthermore, in the 1830s, foreign worker legislation severely limited residency rights for non-Hamburg-born persons who became unemployed. Individual cases also suggest that people of non-European descent might have been treated as more “deportable,” regardless of their time of residency Hamburg. Further inquiry is necessary to substantiate this.Footnote 99

Even the one case in which an enslaved person may have been directly affected by Hamburg’s free-soil law of 1837, that of George Nissen, remains inconclusive. Nissen, who had been born in Africa, was brought to St. Thomas after having been enslaved and transported on board a ship in 1820, long after Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. The vessel being seized, it is unclear whether the boy had subsequently been enslaved by or placed with the German-speaking merchant Johan Peter Nissen on the Caribbean island.Footnote 100 A church registry lists a man named “George” as being enslaved by Nissen in 1832, though it is unclear whether this refers to the same person.Footnote 101 The George Nissen in question first came to Hamburg as a “manservant” in 1835, presumably with merchant Nissen’s approval, where he received vocational training and lived with a master mason in Hamburg until he left for St. Thomas in 1839.Footnote 102 After his return, George Nissen can be found in a 1846 census – two years before the Danish general emancipation – as a free inhabitant and mason on the neighbouring island of St. John.Footnote 103 Undoubtedly, he had benefited in some ways from the legal changes implemented in the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century, though it is not clear whether the 1807 British law or Hamburg’s free-soil law thirty years later had brought about the decisive change.Footnote 104 Nissen lived to the age of around ninety-one, and would be remembered many decades after his death as a respected community elder and family member but also as a skilled builder and a polyglot who spoke “French, Spanish, German, English & Danish.”Footnote 105

Future studies might reveal further cases of emancipation in the Hamburg region, perhaps even some directly linked to the city’s anti-slavery legislation. However, given Hamburg’s network of restrictive regulations, claiming one’s freedom from slavery in the city probably never became routine. Yet, individuals’ fates affected by Hamburg policies and practices elude neat categorization. They ranged from flight attempts and overseas transportation to navigation of the free labour market and apprenticeships. Generally, however, the confluence of slavery laws and alien legislation seems to have resulted in a precarious state of belonging that was often exacerbated by a lack of familial or other supportive social networks. Additionally, many of the non-European people that came to Hamburg worked in economically insecure yet highly regulated sectors. Domestic service in particular, in some cases a direct outgrowth of former enslavement, required no formal training, but offered limited security and relatively low wages, in addition to being tightly policed. Apprenticeships as well as permanent residency or citizenship remained an exception among this group.

Conclusion

Research into Hamburg’s connections to slavery and especially studies of enslaved people in the region are still in their infancy. Nevertheless, the Hamburg case highlights a pattern of interconnections between free-soil policies and alien laws.Footnote 106 Policies aimed at enslaved people and those targeting religious or ethnic minorities, the poor, and the foreign could and did overlap. Hence, the city may not have developed a system of directly policing the (formerly) enslaved, but its authorities wove a thick web of regulations that enabled them to survey and, in some cases, to exile and exclude foreigners, and particularly those with little social support.

In a broader sense, the Hamburg case also points to transience and alien status as important aspects of Black European history. For port cities in particular, the temporary presence of enslaved people of African and Asian descent was not marginal to understandings of and interactions with the institution of slavery. Instead, the arrival of enslaved domestic and maritime workers – and their resistance and flight – made enslavement visible, and resulted in practices of recapture that elicited both moral disgust as well as presumably the willing collaboration of local residents. Whether cities had a chance of becoming places of “informal freedom” also hinged on the nature of such reactions.Footnote 107 Legislatively, by contrast, Hamburg’s free-soil law was radical on paper, but was ratified only in 1837 after decades of legislative inertia around the issue that stood in sharp contrast to the tightening of legislation around foreigners, the poor, and domestic workers. Furthermore, the notable absence of freedom suits, limited evidence of anti-slavery activism, and a lack of a substantial local community of people of African and Asian descent point to extra-legal factors that may have limited the law’s efficacy and retarded its implementation.

The last decades of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century were marked by a global shift away from unfree forms of labour and toward wage labour, with slavery but also serfdom slowly losing grounds.Footnote 108 It is perhaps not incidental that the same period saw an elaboration and proliferation of passport and other control mechanisms that sought to channel mobility and survey identity. In Hamburg, registration mechanisms established to police foreign domestic labourers fed into more encompassing passport systems of the later nineteenth century.Footnote 109 Although further study is necessary, the case examined here points to the nexus of free and unfree labour as well as the emergence of passport systems and surveillance practices as a relevant future field of inquiry when researching slavery and asylum.

Acknowledgements

I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, the editors of this special issue, and the participants of the 2022 “Who Is a Refugee? Concepts of Exile, Refuge and Asylum, c. 1750–1850” conference for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Funding Information

Parts of this project were funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program of the European Union (Grant No. 641110 “The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and its Slaves”). However, this text exclusively reflects the author’s views. The ERC is neither responsible for the content nor for its use.

References

1 Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten, 30 June 1774, 408. All translations are my own.

2 Ibid.

3 Anne Kuhlmann-Smirnov, Schwarze Europäer im Alten Reich: Handel, Migration, Hof (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 39–41 and passim.

4 Johann C. Sinapius, ed., Lesebuch für Kaufleute (Hamburg: Mathießen, 1783), 418. I would like to thank Sarah Lentz for first alerting me to this text’s existence.

5 Ibid., 418.

6 Ibid., 419.

7 In 1802, the pedagogue and publicist Johann Carl Daniel Curio famously – and idealistically – commented: “We have no nobility, no patricians, no slaves, not even subjects.” Daniel Curio, “Einige Bemerkungen zu obigem Aufsazze: Vorzüge einer demokratischen Verfassung etc.” Hamburg und Altona 1:3 (1802), 78. See also Mary Lindemann, The Merchant Republics: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, 1648–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 75–170.

8 Jan Klußmann, “‘Wo sie frey sein, und einen besseren Dienst haben sollte’: Flucht aus der Leibeigenschaft in Schleswig-Holstein in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Konflikt und Kontrolle in Gutsherrschaftsgesellschaften: Über Resistenz- und Herrschaftsverhalten in ländlichen Sozialgebilden der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Jan Peters and Barbara Krug-Richter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995). For a very positive view on Hamburg’s refugee policies, see Janet L. Polasky, Asylum between Nations: Refugees in a Revolutionary Era (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2023), 20–37. On religious toleration, see Joachim Whaley, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

9 Magnus Ressel, “Eine Rezeptionsskizze der atlantischen Sklaverei im frühneuzeitlichen protestantischen Deutschland,” in Theologie und Sklaverei von der Antike bis in die frühe Neuzeit, ed. Nicole Priesching and Heike Grieser (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2016).

10 Julian zur Lage, “Die Hochphase des deutschen Versklavungshandels,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 49:4 (2022); Magnus Ressel, “Hamburg und die Niederelbe im atlantischen Sklavenhandel der Frühen Neuzeit,” WerkstattGeschichte 66//67 (2014), 75–96; Andrea Weindl, “The Slave Trade of Northern Germany from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008).

11 Klaus Weber, Deutsche Kaufleute im Atlantikhandel 1680–1830: Unternehmen und Familien in Hamburg, Cádiz und Bordeaux (Munich: Beck, 2004); Francisca Hoyer, “Relations of Absence: Germans in the East Indies and Their Families c. 1750–1820” (PhD diss., Uppsala University, 2020); Sarah Lentz, “Deutsche Profiteure des atlantischen Sklavereisystems und der deutschsprachige Sklavereidiskurs der Spätaufklärung,” in Das Meer: Maritime Welten in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Peter Burschel and Sünne Juterczenka (Vienna: Böhlau, 2021); Johann P. Oettinger, A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Seventeenth-Century Journal of Johann Peter Oettinger, ed. Craig Koslofsky and Roberto Zaugg (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020).

12 J. M. Lappenberg, ed., Sammlung der Verordnungen der freyen Hanse-Stadt Hamburg, seit 1814, 16 vols. (Hamburg: Johann August Meißner, 1814–1840), 15:70.

13 I use Black and of African descent interchangeably in this article. For a discussion of the vagaries of terminology, see Christina von Hodenberg et al., “Editorial: Words Matter: Our Thoughts on Language, Pseudo-Science, and ‘Race,’” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 42:2 (2020), 3–8.

14 Brandenburg Prussia’s short-lived slave trading company is one such exception. Roberto Zaugg, “Grossfriedrichsburg, the First German Colony in Africa? Brandenburg-Prussia, Atlantic Entanglements and National Memory,” in Shadows of Empire in West Africa: New Perspectives on European Fortifications, ed. John K. Osei-Tutu and Victoria E. Smith (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018); Jürgen C. Nagel, “Die Brandenburgisch-Africanische Compagnie: Ein Handelsunternehmen,” Scripta Mercaturae 30:1 (1996), 44–94. Notably, the German-speaking duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were part of the Danish-Norwegian empire. Eva Heinzelmann, ed., Der dänische Gesamtstaat: Ein unterschätztes Weltreich? (Kiel: Ludwig, 2006).

15 The most thorough work here is Kuhlmann-Smirnov, Schwarze Europäer im Alten Reich. See also, e.g., Sünne Juterczenka, “‘Chamber Moors’ and Court Physicians: On the Convergence of Aesthetic Consumption and Racial Anthropology at Eighteenth-Century Courts in Germany,” in Entangled Knowledge: Scientific Discources and Cultural Difference, ed. Klaus Hock and Gesa Mackenthun (Münster: Waxmann, 2012); Monika Firla, “AfrikanerInnen und ihre Nachkommen im deutschsprachigen Raum vor der Zeit der Kongokonferenz und ihre Folgen: Bemerkungen zur Forschungsproblematik,” in AfrikanerInnen in Deutschland und schwarze Deutsche: Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Reinhard Klein-Arendt (Münster: Lit, 2004); Mark Häberlein, “‘Mohren,’ ständische Gesellschaft und atlantische Welt: Minderheiten und Kulturkontakte in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Atlantic Understandings: Essays on European and American History in Honor of Hermann Wellenreuther, ed. Claudia Schnurmann and Hartmut Lehmann (Hamburg: Lit, 2006).

16 Felix Brahm and Eve Rosenhaft, eds., Slavery Hinterland: Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680–1850 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2016); Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, Josef Köstlbauer, and Sarah Lentz, eds., Beyond Exceptionalism: Traces of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Early Modern Germany, 1650–1850 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021); Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Pia Wiegmink, eds., German Entanglements in Transatlantic Slavery (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019); Josef Köstlbauer, “Ambiguous Passages: Non-Europeans Brought to Europe by the Moravian Brethren during the Eighteenth Century,” in Globalized Peripheries: Central Europe and the Atlantic World, 1680–1860, ed. Jutta Wimmler and Klaus Weber (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2020); Maria I. Diedrich, “From American Slaves to Hessian Subjects: Silenced Black Narratives of the American Revolution,” in Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–1914, ed. Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).

17 Prussia only outlawed slavery in 1857. Sarah Lentz, “Wer helfen kann, der helfe!”: Deutsche SklavereigegnerInnen und die atlantische Abolitionsbewegung, 1780–1860 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), 281–3.

18 On the presence of people of African descent and the region’s slavery ties, see Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren: Afrikaner in Geschichte und Bewußtsein der Deutschen (Hamburg: Junius, 1993), 64–6, 98, 128, 223; Christian Degn, Die Schimmelmanns im atlantischen Dreieckshandel: Gewinn und Gewissen (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1974); zur Lage, “Die Hochphase des deutschen Versklavungshandels.” For Black German history in later periods, see, e.g., Katharina Oguntoye, Eine afro-deutsche Geschichte: Zur Lebenssituation von Afrikanern und Afro-Deutschen in Deutschland von 1884 bis 1950 (Berlin: Hoho, 1997); Fatima El-Tayeb, Schwarze Deutsche: Der Diskurs um ‘Rasse’ und nationale Identität 1890–1933 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2001); Robbie J. M. Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Tina Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

19 Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, “Free Soil: The Generation and Circulation of an Atlantic Legal Principle,” Slavery & Abolition 32:3 (2011), 331–9; Damian Alan Pargas, Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

20 Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Thomas Mareite, Conditional Freedom: Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the U.S. South to Mexico’s Northeast, 1803–1861 (Leiden: Brill, 2023); Cristina Da Nogueira Silva and Keila Grinberg, “Soil Free from Slaves: Slave Law in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Portugal,” Slavery & Abolition 32:3 (2011), 431–46.

21 Pargas, Freedom Seekers, 4–5.

22 This gap is arguably linked to the “legal pluralism” characteristic of empires. Lauren A. Benton and Richard J. Ross, eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

23 For France and the Netherlands as examples, see Karwan Fatah-Black and Matthias van Rossum, “Slavery in a ‘Slave Free Enclave’? Historical Links between the Dutch Republic, Empire and Slavery, 1580s–1860s,” WerkstattGeschichte 25:66/67 (2015), 57–58; Dienke Hondius, “Access to the Netherlands of Enslaved and Free Black Africans: Exploring Legal and Social Historical Practices in the Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries,” Slavery & Abolition 32:3 (2011), 382–88; Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 23–57. See also Pierre H. Boulle, Race et esclavage dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Perrin, 2007).

24 Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France,” 9, 14.

25 Matthew Mason, “North American Calm, West Indian Storm: The Politics of the Somerset Decision in the British Atlantic,” Slavery & Abolition 41:4 (2020), 723–47.

26 Jan C. Jansen, “Aliens in a Revolutionary World: Refugees, Migration Control and Subjecthood in the British Atlantic, 1790s–1820s,” Past & Present 2551 (2022), 189–231; see also William Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens,” Citizenship Studies 6:3 (2002); Maya Jasanoff, “Revolutionary Exiles: The American Loyalist and French Émigré Diasporas,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, ed. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

27 Jansen, “Aliens in a Revolutionary World,” 11–22; Friedemann Pestel, “French Revolution and Migration after 1789,” European History Online, http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/political-migration-exile/friedemann-pestel-french-revolution-and-migration-after-1789.

28 Márta Fata, Mobilität und Migration in der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), 153–69; Lutz Raphael, “Grenzen von Inklusion und Exklusion: Sozialräumliche Regulierung von Fremdheit und Armut im Europa der Neuzeit,” Journal of Modern European History 11:2 (2013), 147–67.

29 Maria Boes, “Unwanted Travellers: Borders and Travelers in Early Modern Europe,” in Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe, ed. Thomas Betteridge (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 104–11. See also Robert Jütte, “Disziplinierungsmechanismen in der städtischen Armenfürsorge der Frühneuzeit,” in Soziale Sicherheit und soziale Disziplinierung, ed. Christoph Sachße and Florian Tennstedt (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1986).

30 US National Archives, Philadelphia 36: Records of the U.S. Custom Service, NAID: 573978, Collection District of Philadelphia (1789–1927), Box 16. The advertisement findings are based on extensive research in four leading Hamburg and Altona newspapers –Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten (1768–1840), Altonaische Mercurius (1760–1840), Börsenhalle (1801–1840), and Hamburger Nachrichten (1793–1840). I researched the advertisements of Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten manually and employed full-text research using search terms pertaining both to slavery and race for the other three. Though it is possible that additional advertisements elsewhere have been overlooked, the total number is unlikely to be much higher. See also Annika Bärwald, “Fugitives in a Free City: Hamburg and Its Handling of Slavery in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Age of Revolutions, https://ageofrevolutions.com/2023/06/15/fugitives-in-a-free-city-hamburg-and-its-handling-of-slavery-in-the-eighteenth-and-nineteenth-centuries/.

31 Simon P. Newman, Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (London: University of London Press, 2022), 58. For North America, see the Freedom on the Move database, https://freedomonthemove.org/.

32 But see Josef Köstlbauer, “Subjugation by Labelling: Analysing the Semantics of Subservience in a Fugitive Slave Case from Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 34:2 (2023), 150–70; Paula von Gleich and Samira Spatzek, “Meine Stadt und Versklavung? Spurensuche in Bremen,” in “Sklaverei,” ed. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, special issue, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (APuZ), 50–51 (2015), 41–6; Jasper Henning Hagedorn, Bremen und die atlantische Sklaverei: Waren, Wissen und Personen, 1780–1860 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2023), 404–23. One of the five Hamburg/Altona advertisements is mentioned but not analysed in Hauke Friederichs, Piraten, Kaper und Korsaren im Mittelmeer: Die Darstellung der nordafrikanischen Barbaresken in der periodischen deutschen Presse des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bremen: edition lumière, 2008), 212–3.

33 Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten, 1 January 1787, 8. See also Friederichs, Piraten, Kaper und Korsaren im Mittelmeer, 212–3.

34 As Damian Pargas notes, even the US Fugitive Slave Laws avoided the use of the terms “slavery” and “slave.” See Pargas, Freedom Seekers, 34.

35 Mikkel V. Pedersen, ed., Danmark: En kolonimagt (Copenhagen: Gads, 2017); Erik Gøbel, The Danish Slave Trade and Its Abolition (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

36 Poul E. Olsen, “Disse vilde karle: Negre i Danmark indtil 1848,” in Fremmede i Danmark: 400 års fremmedpolitik, ed. Bent Blüdnikow (Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1987), 113.

37 Gustav Sætra, “Adam: Herlofsons negerslave,” in Nordmenn i Afrika– Afrikanere i Norge, ed. Kirsten A. Kjerland and Anne K. Bang (Bergen: Vigmostad & Bjørke, 2002), 14–5; Hanne Østhus, “The Case of Adam Jacobsen. Enslavement in 18th-Century Norway,” Scandinavian Journal of History 48:5 (2023), 635–55; Gísli Pálsson, The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 105–7.

38 Holger Böning and Emmy Moepps, “Einführung in den zweiten Band der biobibliographischen Handbücher der deutschen Presse: Altona, Bergedorf, Harburg, Schiffbek und Wandsbek,” in Altona: Bergedorf – Harburg – Schiffbek – Wandsbek; kommentierte Bibliographie der Zeitungen, Zeitschriften, Intelligenzblätter, Kalender und Almanache sowie biographische Hinweise zu Herausgebern, Verlegern und Druckern periodischer Schriften, ed. Holger Böning and Emmy Moepps (1996), xxviii–xxix.

39 Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten, 25 February 1796, 127. It is unclear whether the captain was a member of the slave-owning Tredwell family of Long Island. Ann Haddad, “Meet the Tredwells: The Ancestry of Seabury Tredwell,” Merchant’s House Museum (blog), 20 February 2019, https://merchantshouse.org/blog/seabury-tredwell-ancestry/.

40 Five guineas equalled five pounds and five shillings. For the calculation in wages, see The National Archives, “Currency Converter: 1270–2017,” www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/.

41 W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 16–8.

42 Altonaischer Mercurius, 24 November 1795: 188, 2694. The “mark” currency referenced here may have referred to the Hamburg Mark Banco, which was not coined but used as a stable currency for commerce.

43 Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten, 24 September 1797, 599.

44 On tarring as a punishment, see William Sayers et al., “Notes,” The Mariner’s Mirror 96:3 (2010), 317–36.

45 The currency likely referred to the Danish Speciesthaler. On this and the more valuable Danish Speciesthaler Courant, see Jürgen W. Koch, “Der Hamburger Spritzenmeister und Mechaniker Johann Georg Repsold (1770–1830), ein Beispiel für die Feinmechanik im norddeutschen Raum zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts” (PhD diss., Universität Hamburg, 2001), 29.

46 Of the crew lists stored at the US National Archives in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., only the Port of Philadelphia records have been extensively preserved. Future research may also take into consideration crew lists for ports north of Pennsylvania.

47 Richard S. Newman has argued that Pennsylvania itself “became one of the first battlegrounds” for free-soil policies with the law’s passage. Richard S. Newman, “‘Lucky to Be Born in Pennsylvania’: Free Soil, Fugitive Slaves and the Making of Pennsylvania’s Anti-Slavery Borderland,” Slavery & Abolition 32:3 (2011), 414.

48 US National Archives, Philadelphia 36: Custom Service, Collection District of Philadelphia, Box 16.

49 Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 91–244. See also Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016). On Denmark, see Gøbel, The Danish Slave Trade and Its Abolition, 65–137.

50 See, e.g., Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror; Julius Sherrard Scott, The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution (London: Verso, 2018).

51 Megan Maruschke, “Bordering through the Lens of Slavery and Abolition,” in Processes of Spatialization in the Americas: Configurations and Narratives, ed. Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez and Hannes Warnecke-Berger (Bern: Peter Lang, 2018); Pargas, Freedom Seekers, 28.

52 N. A. T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix, ed. B. W. Higman (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1992), 124–36; Bolster, Black Jacks, 131–56; Theresa A. Singleton and Jane Landers, “Maritime Marronage: Archaeological, Anthropological, and Historical Approaches,” Slavery & Abolition 42:3 (2021), 419–27.

53 See Lentz, “Wer helfen kann, der helfe!”

54 See zur Lage, “Die Hochphase des deutschen Versklavungshandels”; Gøbel, The Danish Slave Trade and Its Abolition, 14–5.

55 Adolph F. Löffler, “Begriff vom Sklavenhandel: I,” Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten, 23 August 1784, 66, 523. See also Sarah Lentz, “Practicing Medicine on Shaky Ground: German-Speaking Ship’s Doctors Aboard Enslavement Trade Vessels,” Journal of Global Slavery 8:2–3 (2023), 207–36.

56 Sinapius, Lesebuch für Kaufleute, 417.

57 I explore this in more depth in my dissertation.

58 Thomas Harris and Reverdy Johnson, eds., Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of Appeals of Maryland, in 1806, 1807, 1808, & 1909 (Annapolis, Md., 1826), 147–50. See also Bolster, Black Jacks, 154. On passing for free, see Amani Marshall, “‘They Will Endeavor to Pass for Free’: Enslaved Runaways’ Performances of Freedom in Antebellum South Carolina,” Slavery & Abolition 31:2 (2010), 161–80; Viola Franziska Müller, Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

59 Elsewhere in the German-speaking territories, both the legality of slavery or serfdom could be invoked in the retrieval of enslaved people. See Hagedorn, Bremen und die atlantische Sklaverei, 404–17; Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, “Slavery and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in Mallinckrodt, Köstlbauer, and Lentz, Beyond Exceptionalism, 152–6; Köstlbauer, “Subjugation by Labelling,” 160–6.

60 Pargas, Freedom Seekers, 3–4.

61 On a similar note see Seymour Drescher, “Manumission in a Society without Slave Law: Eighteenth Century England,” Slavery & Abolition 10:3 (1989), 85–6.

62 For contemporary political theory on this issue, see Seyla Benhabib, “Citizens, Residents, and Aliens in a Changing World: Political Membership in the Global Era,” Social Research 66:3 (1999), 709–44.

63 The Danish Abolition Act also contained free-soil clauses that should have applied to Altona as well. See Olsen, “Disse vilde karle,” 113–4.

64 Cited in Ernst Baasch, Die Handelskammer zu Hamburg 1665–1915, vol. 2 (Hamburg: Gräfe & Sillem, 1915), 359.

65 Klaus Weber, “Deutschland, der atlantische Sklavenhandel und die Plantagenwirtschaft der Neuen Welt (15. bis 19. Jahrhundert),” Journal of Modern European History 7:1 (2009), 52.

66 Hagedorn, Bremen und die atlantische Sklaverei, 363–6.

67 Ressel, “Hamburg und die Niederelbe im atlantischen Sklavenhandel der Frühen Neuzeit,” 92–4; Sarah Lentz, “‘No German Ship Conducts Slave Trade!’: The Public Controversy about German Participation in the Slave Trade during the 1840s,” in Mallinckrodt, Köstlbauer, and Lentz, Beyond Exceptionalism, 296–303.

68 Lappenberg, Sammlung der Verordnungen der freyen Hanse-Stadt Hamburg, seit 1814, 15:59.

69 Hagedorn, Bremen und die atlantische Sklaverei, 405.

70 Lappenberg, Sammlung der Verordnungen der freyen Hanse-Stadt Hamburg, seit 1814, 15:71.

71 Pargas, Freedom Seekers, 8; Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies, 124–36.

72 In Bremen, such legislation was vetoed in 1837. See Hagedorn, Bremen und die atlantische Sklaverei, 365, 414.

73 Gottfried Schütze, Sammlung der Hamburgischen Gesetze und Verfassungen in Bürger- und Kirchlichen, auch Cammer-Handlungs- und übrigen Policey-Angelegenheiten und Geschäften samt historischen Einleitungen, vol. 12 (Hamburg: Piscator, 1774), 58–59, 85–86; see also Whaley, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 70–110.

74 Lindemann, Patriots and Paupers, 146–50.

75 Christian D. Anderson, ed., Sammlung hamburgischer Verordnungen, 8 vols. (Hamburg: Carl Wilhelm Meyn, 1783–1820), 2:371.

76 Ibid., 2:371.

77 Ibid., 3:226–7. For reissues, see, e.g., ibid., 4:261 and 5:71.

78 A 1783 law particularly targeted Jewish beggars. See ibid, 2:16. Other laws pertaining to foreigners were issued in ibid, 3:344 (1792), 4:61 (1795), 4:186 (1796), 6:143 (1803), 7:51 (1805), 7:68 (1807). Lappenberg, Sammlung der Verordnungen der freyen Hanse-Stadt Hamburg, seit 1814, 5:21–5, 2:58, 68, 124. Several of them were reissued or reworked in the following years.

79 Anderson, Sammlung hamburgischer Verordnungen, 4:186.

80 Ibid., 4:186–7.

81 Some literature has focused on the discourses on luxury and supposed moral depravity that surrounded the émigrés. See Polasky, Asylum between Nations, 20–61. Friedemann Pestel, however, has emphasised the contingent of servants and poorer refugees among those fleeing revolutionary France. See Pestel, “French Revolution and Migration after 1789.”

82 Sailors were targeted especially during a cholera outbreak in the early 1830s.

83 Lappenberg, Sammlung der Verordnungen der freyen Hanse-Stadt Hamburg, seit 1814, 5:21–5. Such Gesindeordnungen existed in many other German-speaking territories as well as across Europe. See Rainer Schröder, “Gesinderecht im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Gesinde im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Gotthard Frühsorge, Rainer Gruenter, and Beatrix Wolff Metternich (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995), 27; Raffaela Sarti, “Who Are Servants? Defining Domestic Service in Western Europe (16th–21th Centuries),” in Proceedings of the Servant Project, ed. Suzy Pasleau and Isabelle Schopp, vol. 2 (Liège: Éditions de l’Université de Liège, 2005), 7–8.

84 Lappenberg, Sammlung der Verordnungen der freyen Hanse-Stadt Hamburg, seit 1814, 14:497–503.

85 Ibid., 499.

86 I have not included people who had been born outside of Europe but were (most likely) of European descent.

87 Hamburg State Archive (hereafter StH) 332-8 Meldewesen A11 Meldeprotokolle für das fremde männliche und weibliche Gesinde, vol. 10, 370.

88 Ibid., 12:477.

89 Ibid., 3:532.

90 Ibid., 12:293, 16:457.

91 Annika Bärwald, “Black Hamburg: People of Asian and African Descent Navigating a Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Job Market,” in Mallinckrodt, Köstlbauer, and Lentz, Beyond Exceptionalism.

92 On the tendency to over-emphasise (and romanticise) mobility and agency, see Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37:1 (2003), 113–24; Jan de Vries, “Playing with Scales: The Global and the Micro, the Macro and the Nano,” Past & Present 242, Supplement 14 (2019), 23–36.

93 On the differences between expulsion and deportation, see Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens.”

94 Ulf Bollmann, “Wegen ‘Sodomiterey’ und ‘incorrigiblen Huhren Lebens,’” Zeitschrift für Niederdeutsche Familienkunde 73:2 (1998). See also Clare Anderson, ed., A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018); Diana Paton, “An ‘Injurious’ Population: Caribbean-Australian Penal Transportation and Imperial Racial Politics,” Cultural and Social History 5:4 (2015), 449–64.

95 I explore this in more depths in my dissertation. See also Lindemann, Patriots and Paupers, 149.

96 StH 611-2 St. Georgshospital VIII B a 15 Taufbuch Kirche zu St. Georg, 182; StH 242-1 Gefängniswesen I C 6 Aufnahmebuch Zucht- und Spinnhaus, vol. 1, 145.

97 Dirk Brietzke, “‘Hamburg giebt den übrigens Christen das erste Beyspiel…’: Das Werk- und Zuchthaus als Kerninstanz des Hamburger Armenwesens im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Sozialpolitik der Aufklärung: Johann Beckmann und die Folgen, ed. Hans-Peter Müller (Münster: Waxmann, 1999), 52–3, 59; Werner von Melle, Die Entwicklung des öffentlichen Armenwesens in Hamburg (Hamburg: Jowien, 1883), 149.

98 StH 242-1 Gefängnisverwaltung I C 2 Band 1 Aufnahmebücher für das Werk- und Zuchthaus, 1790–1810, 111, 145, 166. There is no indication that any of those seven persons was of African or Asian descent.

99 On deportability, see Nicholas P. de Genova, “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002), 419–47.

100 Lightbourne Mail Notes, 18 December 1903, Obituary George Nissen, page unknown; George F. Tyson, “The Enighed Estate and Ruin of St. John, U.S.V.I.” (Island Resources Foundation, Charlotte Amalie, U.S.V.I, 1976), 17–8. I would like to thank Aimery Caron for generously sharing the obituary with me.

101 Danish National Archive Landsarkivet for Sjælland m.m. EC-776, 1/776-4 Den kulørte missionsmenighed, St. Thomas og St. Jan, Enesteministerialbog 1788–1849, 257.

102 StH 332-8 Meldewesen A 11 Meldeprotokolle Gesinde, vol. 9, 323.

103 Danish National Archive 303 Rentekammeret 8 Folketælling 1846, unpaginated, Estate Pleasant Look Out.

104 Oral tradition offers a third explanation, that Nissen had “purchase[d] his freedom from his master, Jens Peter Nissen, in 1839.” Tyson, “The Enighed Estate and Ruin of St. John, U.S.V.I.,” 17.

105 Lightbourne Mail Notes, 18 December 1903, Obituary George Nissen.

106 See also Jansen, “Aliens in a Revolutionary World,” 41–3.

107 Pargas, Freedom Seekers, 4–5.

108 See also Valeska Huber, “Multiple Mobilities: Über den Umgang mit verschiedenen Mobilitätsformen um 1900,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36:2 (2010), 325–33; Jan Lucassen, “Free and Unfree Labour before the Twentieth Century: A Brief Overview,” in Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues, ed. Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997).

109 On passports, see John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For the longue durée, see Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2007).