The absence of black people from mainstream histories of Britain, and the lazy assumption that the presence of African and Caribbean people began with the SS Windrush docking at Tilbury, east of London, in 1948, means few today know there were black Romans, black Tudors, and black Stuarts here hundreds of years earlier. Also written out of history are the way people from Africa played a central role in the developing workers and democratic movements of nineteenth century Britain, and the way their lives were deeply intertwined with struggles of the white poor. And missing too from many histories of the British Empire are twentieth century gatherings and conferences of black people in Britain where Africa’s soon to be independence leaders made their plans.
Hakim Adi aims to put all this, and much more, right with his majestic new book African Caribbean People in Britain: A History. To start with, he details the lives of African people in London and beyond in the sixteenth century, the period before Britain’s entrance into the Transatlantic slave trade. We learn that most came to Britain from north Africa as ‘property of the rich’, via the two principle slaving nations, Spain and Portugal. But that once here, there were no laws that could justify the holding of human beings as slaves, so some were able to escape the clutches of their masters and make their lives here. The absence of legal codes, however, does not mean that Britain was without skin colour prejudices at this time For example, Adi notes that, in 1596, the Privy Council wrote an open letter to the mayor of London claiming that Elizabeth Tudor knew ‘there are of late divers Blackmoores brought into the Realme, of which kinde of persons there are all ready to manie’.
Yet, such official missives rarely touched the lives of the thousands of black people here. According to Adi they, worked ‘in a variety of occupations, lived in towns and villages throughout England and Scotland and intermarried and formed sexual relations with their British contemporaries. They were subject to no special laws and had very similar status to their neighbours’.
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