Book Subscribers of Formerly Enslaved English Authors, 1782-1794

This dataset concerns the relationship between two sets of people: three formerly enslaved Black authors (Ottobah Cugoano, Ignatius Sancho, and Olaudah Equiano) and 6,547 names of subscribers representing as many as 4,000 unique individuals who financially supported those authors. It provides a snapshot of England’s publishing industry in the late eighteenth century, and how Black Britons navigated it before the Slavery Abolition Act in 1834. All three authors were enslaved at some point in their lifetime, and their books formed key touchstones in published debates around slavery. The books’ subscriber lists serve as a documentary record of the broader social circles that financially supported and publicly affiliated themselves with their writing.