Black and British summary

During her stay in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, the African American historian Gretchen Gerzina visited a bookshop in London. While there, she spoke with the shop assistant, who informed her that there “were no Black people in England before 1945.” 

The shop assistant’s claim couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, the first Africans arrived in Britain in the third century CE. At the time, Britain, like other parts of Europe and North Africa, was part of the Roman Empire. The Africans who settled in Britain then were Roman subjects. They were referred to in the historical records as “Aurelian moors” and arrived as part of military units serving in the Empire’s northern garrison in England, at a fortress known as Aballava, in what is today the county of Cumbria.

Historical records provide us with only the faintest glimpses into the lives of Black people living in England between the years 1485 and 1603, when the Tudors – including the famous Queen Elizabeth I – ruled. One record, for instance, refers to “three blackamore maids” who were employed by Paul Banning, a London alderman, in 1586. Mary, referred to as a “negro of John White,” was baptized in Plymouth in 1594. But beyond these basic details, we know very little about these Black Britons. 

While these glimpses are fleeting, they point to the fact that most Black people in Tudor England were employed as domestic servants, occupying the lower social rungs. Nonetheless, a tiny handful of Black Britons reached the very top of Tudor society. Among them was John Blanke, who probably came to England as part of the entourage of Catherine of Aragon, who had arrived from Portugal in 1501 to marry Arthur, Prince of Wales. Blanke became a trumpeter in the Tudor court. When, following the death of Arthur, Catherine married Henry VIII, Blanke performed at the celebrations marking the birth of Prince Henry, the second child born to Henry and Catherine.

In 1637, out of a population of 6,000, there were only 200 enslaved Africans in Barbados. By 1680, there were 38,000 enslaved people on the island, vastly outnumbering the white slave-owning class. 

This drastic increase in the number of enslaved people points to the rapid expansion of the slave trade during the second half of the seventeenth century. This expansion had grave consequences for relations between white and Black people. Prior to the rise of slavery, society was divided along class lines – white indentured servants, for instance, occupied the lower rungs of the social hierarchy along with Black people. In 1661, however, Barbados sugar planters passed the Barbados Slave Code. For the first time, this code drew a distinction between “white” servants and “negro” slaves. All white men of all classes were given rights that were denied to all Black people. “White and negro” became the new dominant categories, thus splitting society along racial lines. As such, the rise of the British slave trade was accompanied by the rise of a racial ideology that stratified society according to white and Black.

One day in London in 1772, James Somerset, an escaped slave, arrived at the doorstep of an abolitionist named Granville Sharp. For over 20 years, Somerset had been enslaved under Charles Stewart in the colony of Virginia. In 1769, Stewart brought Somerset with him to London. Two years later, Somerset escaped but was recaptured by Stewart. Having managed a second escape in that same year, Somerset sought Sharpe’s aid in helping him maintain his freedom.

Sharp took Somerset’s cause to the British courts. While slave-dependent British colonies such as Virginia and Barbados had evolved clear laws designed to protect the slave system and to ensure the rights of slave owners over slaves, Britain had not. This meant that when slave owners brought slaves on to British soil, their legal rights over their slaves were unclear. Could an enslaved person continue to be held in captivity on British soil, if Britain had no explicit law authorizing slavery? Did slave masters have a right to have escaped slaves in Britain forcibly returned to them?

In 1781, the Zong, a slave ship, sailed from Accra, in Ghana, with 442 enslaved people on board – twice the number a ship of that size was designed to carry. After a series of navigational errors by the crew, which led to the ship spending more time at sea, freshwater supplies began to run low, and disease spread among all those on board. To preserve supplies and ensure that at least some enslaved people reached Jamaica alive, the crew of the Zong undertook a terrible action. They cast 133 of the most diseased and frail captives overboard, into the ocean.

The events aboard the ship only came to public attention in 1783, when the owners of the Zong filed an insurance claim for the loss of “cargo,” demanding 30 British Pounds for each captive the crew had thrown overboard. When the cold financial reasoning behind the massacre came to light, there was public outrage.

In 1792, Eli Whitney, a school teacher in Savannah, Georgia, invented a simple machine that separated useless cotton seeds from the valuable cotton fiber in which they were trapped. This process had previously been done by hand in a laborious procedure that slowed down the cultivation and harvesting of cotton. Whitney’s cotton gin – “gin” being short for “engine” – reduced the time it took to separate seeds from fiber by a factor of eight.

Whitney’s invention transformed the economics of cotton production. The invention gave American cotton slavery – which many had assumed would slowly decline – a terrible second wind. In the wake of Whitney’s cotton gin, more and more planters turned to the lucrative business of cotton cultivation. As a result, in southern states such as Louisiana, Alabama, and the Carolinas, the demand for slave labor rose. 

In 1884, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society held an “anti-slavery jubilee” in London to celebrate 50 years since the abolition of British slavery. Three months later, on the other side of Europe, the Berlin Conference of 1884 was convened. It involved diplomats and politicians representing the “Great Powers” – European countries such as Britain, Germany, France, and Belgium, among other states. This conference – which did not include a single African representative – was aimed at dividing up the continent of Africa among the Great Powers.

It marked the beginning of the “Scramble for Africa” – the period in which European colonial rule over the continent spread exponentially. In 1870, 90 percent of the continent was under African rule, and only 10 percent under European control. By 1900, the opposite was true – 90 percent of the continent was controlled by Europeans. During that period, nine million square miles of land were added to the European empires. No country was more successful in the scramble for Africa than Britain. By 1900, one in three Africans was a British subject. This added up to 45 million new subjects.

During World War I, one million Africans were recruited as “carriers” – porters carrying supplies to British troops fighting the Germans in Africa. Of those, at least 100,000 died during the war.

In Europe itself, the British War Office refused to allow Black men to fight against the Germans. While the War Office created a special regiment for Black servicemen – the British West Indies Regiment, or BWIR – it was used as a labor battalion to support white troops. British authorities believed that allowing Black soldiers to fight white men, including the German enemy, would undermine racial prestige, which would, in turn, threaten British control over Black subjects in the colonies.

Confronted with the might of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi army, Britain had no choice but to allow Black people to fight against German soldiers during World War II. Twelve thousand West Indians served in the British army in Europe, but the vast majority of Black soldiers – 372,000 – were deployed in Africa.

Racism became much less acceptable in the aftermath of Hitler’s defeat, especially given the atrocities committed in Germany in the name of racial ideology. Nonetheless, in Britain, racism continued to persist in subtle ways. For instance, while there was a massive postwar shortage of workers in the country, the British government was reluctant to allow Black workers from the colonies into Britain.