Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

By the 1780s the defenders of slavery had begun a campaign of racist propagandizing that lasted until the 1830s. By the time the committee was formed, Edward Long’s influential History of Jamaica, with its hysterical warnings about the dangers of racial mixing, had been in print for twelve years. The view that the presence of black men in Britain would lead to a form of racial pollution was gaining currency. As the idea took hold, fuelled by pro-slavery pamphlets and satirical cartoons that lampooned black people, it was not just the sight of black men reduced to vagrancy that disturbed many wealthy Londoners, but the sight of black men with white wives and mixed-race children that stuck in their throats. Unlike the slaves dressed in livery who opened the doors of fashionable West London homes, or the little black pageboys in feathered Ottoman turbans making tea for their mistresses, the black poor were regarded as a threat rather than a novelty.