ABSTRACT
The notices of runways and strays – much like advertisements in the colonial Caribbean for the sale of enslaved men, women and children, horses, mules and cattle – bear troubling similarities. For instance, the St. George's Chronicle and Grenada Gazette gave notice of a runaway who "pretends to be free, and calls himself Antoine". The chapter offers an initial exploration of the captive human–animal nexus of which the newspaper notices are one source of evidence. It focuses on the notion of "agency" that has dominated work on slavery alongside recent elaborations of the concept within the field of animal studies. The chapter discusses animal studies to examine societies where human slavery existed and to urge historians of slavery to engage with the animal turn. K. Jacoby postulated that the connections between human enslavement and the domestication of nonhuman animals could be explained by a "deeper connection" associated with the development of agriculture.
