Runaway advertisements placed by owners in colonial newspapers are among the few records in which enslaved people surface as individuals, with injuries, accents, clothing and friendships attached to them. Geggus assesses the online archive that has gathered such notices from Les Affiches Americaines, the Saint-Domingue paper that ran from 1766 to 1791, presenting each item as a photograph beside a searchable transcription.

He tempers the praise. The organizers overstate both the inaccessibility of the newspaper, microfilmed and digitized years earlier, and the neglect of the fugitive material; their bibliography missed much recent scholarship, and a published total of individuals identified looks to him like an error.

The verdict is still favourable. Jail registers of recaptured fugitives, unique to the French colonies and rarely studied, are now being added, which should permit comparison between those who got away and those brought back, and the project is expanding to newspapers from Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Louisiana and elsewhere.