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May 16 - June 15, 2019
According to scripture, Ham had humiliated his father, and as punishment for his transgression Noah had placed a terrible curse upon Ham’s son Canaan.
Although neither race nor skin colour is mentioned within these passages from Genesis, at some point the story of the Curse of Ham became racialized.
Despite the biblical notion of the Curse of Ham, there was no commonly recognized or popularly understood link between the condition of slavery and the people of Africa at this time – that was to come later.1
This is no longer true due to the effort of several historians (Imtiaz Habib, Miranda Kaufmann, Onyeka Nubia, Marika Sherwood and others) who have scoured the archives and uncovered the identities of literally hundreds of ‘black Tudors’.2
a black man who was part of the Tudor court. His name was John Blanke, and he may well have arrived in England in 1501, as part of the entourage of Catherine of Aragon, who had come to London to marry Arthur, Prince of Wales, the elder brother of Henry VIII.
he is the first black person in Britain for whom we have not just a name in the official records but also an image;
It seems likely that Blanke, who most probably came to Britain from Spain, was given a surname that reflected that life’s journey. Historians have speculated that ‘Blanke’ might be an example of Tudor ironic humour – a comic play on words based around blanco and blanc, meaning white in Spanish and French respectively.9
He was a foreigner, a non-Christian, and an African marked out by difference in skin colour. Furthermore, he was enslaved. Yet his testimony was accepted and his humanity acknowledged by the court at a time when the testimonies of thousands of white English villeins (bonded serfs) would not have been admissible in court.
What rights did they accord them? Were there then, present and detectable within those societies, forms of what we today would recognize as racism?
entitled him to kidnap and sell a number of black people resident in England.
Richard Hakluyt’s bestselling Principal Navigations was published in 1598 – the year when Shakespeare wrote Henry IV, Part 2 and started Much Ado About Nothing
Leo Africanus is often considered to have influenced Shakespeare’s characterization of Othello.19
Blackness in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was associated with the night, the supernatural and the diabolical. The devil was depicted as black in innumerable medieval paintings, and continued to be portrayed as such in Elizabethan and Stuart woodcuts.
To call someone black in Shakespeare’s England was to insult them, not by any linkage with race, but because the colour itself was pregnant with negative symbolism.20
extreme heat, as was found in Africa, unbalanced the supposed four humours of the body and rendered men more volatile and vengeful – an aspect of a theory known to historians as ‘geohumoralism’. Might this be true of black men born under the heat of an African sun?21
If any single factor explains why all this changed, and why the fate and prosperity of the British Isles became so firmly tied to Africa, that factor would be sugar.
Brexit
The intensity of sugar production, combined with the decline in the numbers of indentured servants immigrating into the island, provided the planters of Barbados with the economic rationale for the transition towards African slavery. By the 1640s the Barbados planters were abandoning other crops in favour of sugar and were well on the way towards discarding indentured labour.
system of passes was instituted that required all slaves absent from the plantations upon which they worked to have a ticket that accounted for their absence and explained the reasons for their journey. Those unable to produce the necessary document were to be subjected to a ‘moderate whipping’.24
Critically, the Barbados Slave Code drew clear distinctions between white ‘servants’ and ‘negro’ slaves, and it used the terms ‘negro’ and ‘slave’ interchangeably. To be black on Barbados was to be a slave.
Mutilation of the face, slitting of nostrils, branding of cheeks and foreheads and castration were all deemed acceptable punishments for Africans. The list of offences for which the approved punishment for black people was death was expanded to include petty theft and the destruction of property.
The planters, who had long held the white poor in deep disdain, especially Irish indentured servants and the convict labourers, understood that white racial unity was an insurance policy that might protect them in the event of a slave rebellion.
For the English, the waning of Spanish power made it possible for the Barbados blueprint to be applied elsewhere. When the English Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell went to war with Spain in the 1650s, the English seized the island of Jamaica. Twenty-five times the size of Barbados, Jamaica was a vast and glittering prize.
Where the two islands differed was that Jamaican planters proved more reluctant to execute slaves accused of petty offences. This was not because the men who ran Jamaica were more moderate or humane than their countrymen in Barbados, but because in its formative decades Jamaica struggled to secure enough black slaves
In 1619, at the first English settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, ‘20 and odd Negroes’ had been landed – an event that is often regarded as the symbolic beginning of African slavery in North America.
The company operated until 1667, by which time it had delivered to the English planters of the New World colonies sixteen thousand African slaves, yet was heavily in debt.
The historian William A. Pettigrew has chronicled how the separate traders took on what they called the ‘African Monster’ and launched a political campaign against the Royal African Company, demanding that access to the slave trade be made a right of all Englishmen.
Stone-blind to irony, they argued, audaciously and amorally, that the right to enslave Africans was a defining feature of English freedom.
In the tobacco-producing regions of North America, the newly secured availability of expanded numbers of enslaved ‘Negro servants’ allowed the plantation owners to begin to make the full and irrevocable transition away from white indentured servitude and towards the full reliance on African slavery. This transition was to be written into the laws of Virginia in the following decades, in a series of slave laws that formalized the binary, black and white, nature of Virginia society. Like Barbados, the North American colonies became full slave societies.
In the last decades of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, Africans arrived as slaves and as free people in greater numbers than in any previous period. From those decades onwards, the black presence in Britain has been unbroken and continuous. The presence of these black Georgians became a recognized symbol of the burgeoning new age of globalism, prosperity and brutality.
For despite the wigs, the bustling, fussy clothing and much else that is superficial and unimportant, the hypocritical, corrupt, sentimental, acquisitive, nationalistic, xenophobic, debauched, drunken, scandal-obsessed, globally-aware, riot-prone, debt-fuelled, multi-racial Britain of the late eighteenth century is instantly redolent of us.
Both Britains – that of the late eighteenth century and early twenty-first century – were sustained by illusory, booming, bubble economies, built on the shifting sands of credit and debt.
The enslaved Africans who were the unwilling producers of those commodities were separated from the consumers by an ocean, and gradually by the developing idea of race.
Georgian prints reveal that there were black performers in the hugely popular fairs. Hogarth’s depiction of Southwark Fair in 1733 has a black trumpeter in the foreground, entertaining the crowd.
over two dozen black people appear in his works,
In 1744 a notice in the Daily Advertiser read, To be sold. A pretty little Negro Boy, about nine Years old, and well limb’d. If not dispos’d of, is to be sent to the West Indies in six days Time. He is to be seen at the Dolphin Tavern in Tower Street.4
Historians have found around forty listings like it in English newspapers, and eight in Scottish periodicals, all from between 1709 and 1792.
A custom developed in the slave ships that plied the triangular trade that their captains were entitled to bring back a handful of slaves to sell in Britain. It was in effect a bonus that increased their personal profit from each voyage.
Bristol appears to have been at the centre of this custom and there are advertisements in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers of that city offering ‘Negro’ boys for sale to ‘gentlemen or ladies’.
The size of the black British population in the age of slavery is a mystery that lies beyond the capacity of historians to solve. All we have are the estimates that were made at the time.
tally, rather undermined Long’s efforts to frighten the British public with apocalyptical visions of their nation brought to chaos by a large and rapidly expanding black community, whose unrestrained sexuality was contaminating the blood of the English;
the majority of black Georgians lived in London, with lesser but significant numbers in Bristol and Liverpool.
The St Giles’ area was said to be home to a black community known as the ‘St Giles’ blackbirds’, but the sources for this are vague.
Black Britons can been found in formal group portraits by Reynolds and Zoffany as well as in the earthy depictions of Georgian street life produced by Hogarth.
Black slave boys – and they usually were boys – became prized status symbols. There were certainly some black female maids in Britain but as they were deemed less fashionable they appear less often in art.
As the historian David Dabydeen has written, ‘the black existed merely to reflect upon the white’.22 It was an extreme form of objectification, one that was sometimes emphasized by having these black children pose alongside other ‘products’ of the tropics – exotic fruits, monkeys, and parrots and other birds that were rare and sought-after.
This fascination with contrast was so pronounced that slaves with darker complexions appear, on occasions, to have been valued more highly than those with lighter skin.
Not insignificantly, enslaved Africans are repeatedly pictured alongside dogs, cockatoos, monkeys and other pets. The result is that although such paintings are by definition group portraits, the black people appear in them as lonely isolated figures.
Another group were students. The chiefs of Sierra Leone sent their sons to Britain to receive educations that would assist their families in their trading deals with Europeans. Around fifty boys, and some girls, from Sierra Leone were said to be studying in Liverpool in 1789, and there were others in Bristol, Lancaster and London. Some chiefs sent their wives as well as their children.
Wells freed his mother and a handful of other relatives but continued as a slave owner, despite his own racial heritage.
On 10 February 1763 an advertisement in the Bath Chronicle offered to ‘sufficiently reward’ any person willing to return ‘A Negro Servant Named Gloucester’ to his owner, John Stone of Chippenham.
