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By Sherwood

In “Visible Bodies,” authors Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton explain how the emergence of an advertising culture made “the bodies of the poor, the troublesome and the criminal” apparent to the upper echelons of society (39). Whereas previously the elite would rarely encounter or interact with these less fortunate individuals, now the desires and needs of the masses were represented by ads in print newspapers. Advertisments also served as a way for owners to identify and retrieve runaways, either indebted servants or slaves who had fled. Morgan and Rushton conclude that the “careful descriptions” were necessary because quite simply, “people were not what they seemed” (40). They often obscured their race, class, gender and past.

In his article “Reading the Runaways,” David Waldstreicher argues that fugitive advertisements from colonial era newspapers demonstrate an instance in which Morgan and Rushton’s conclusion rings true by showing how blacks cleverly manipulated their circumstances to resist servitude. For example, escaped slaves like Tom were able to operate in a market in which they were “producers, consumers, and commodities” by leveraging trade skills, multiple languages, travel experience and mixed racial ancestry to their advantage (245). Living on the margins of society, you see, gave slaves a unique understanding of the peoples and cultures of colonial America. Waldstreicher’s interpretation of colonial slavery is pretty unique. Certainly, blacks resisted their bonds, as any slave would. But I’m suspicious of the claim that slaves operated with such autonomy.

But giving Waldstreicher the benefit of the doubt, what made these authors essentially describe the 18th century as an “age of disguise?” I’d reckon that the close interaction of varying races, languages, occupations, genders and social classes facilitated by urban environments led to the emergence of a cosmopolitan population with a wide-ranging knowledge of these subjects. Certainly, cosmopolitanism seems consistent with the increased globalization and urbanization of the 18th century. This phenomenon is particularly interesting to us, since we’re interested in network analysis. The kind of social networks that Alec describes in his historiography were not possible before the 18th century, or at least they would have been much less dense. If we could graph them, cosmopolitans like Tom would likely be the “missing link” between most networks.