Contents

Introduction

Preface

  1.  

‘Those kinde of people’

Africans in Britannia

Africans in Scotland

Africans in England

Queen Elizabeth’s response

A Khoi-khoin in England

  2.

‘Necessary Implements’

Sugar and slavery

Chattels and status symbols

Pageant performers

  3.

Britain’s slave ports

A profitable business

The slave-merchants of Bristol and Liverpool

London as a slave port: the West India lobby

Competition

Quality control

Black people in the slave ports

The slave ports’ self-image

  4.

The black community takes shape

Early black organizations

Black people at work

Asians in Britain

Black musicians

  5.

Eighteenth-century voices

Ukawsaw Gronniosaw

Phillis Wheatley

 

Ignatius Sancho

Ottobah Cugoano

Olaudah Equiano

  6.

Slavery and the law

The legal pendulum

 

Granville Sharp challenges the slave-owners

The Somerset case

Slavery and the Scottish law

Mass murder on the high seas

The Grace Jones case

  7.

The rise of English racism

Race prejudice and racism

The demonology of race

Plantocracy racism

Pseudo-scientific racism

  8.

Up from slavery

The black poor

Resistance and self-emancipation

Abolitionists and radicals

The black radicals

The everyday struggle, 1787-1833

  9.

Challenges to empire

William Cuffay

 

Mary Seacole

Ira Aldridge

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Challenges from Asia

The rise of Pan-Africanism

Black workers and soldiers

10.

Under attack

Racism as riot: 1919

 

Claude McKay and the ‘Horror on the Rhine’

Defence and counter-attack

 

Racism as colour bar

Racism as riot: 1948

11.

The settlers

 

The post-war immigration

Racism as riot: 1958

Surrender to racism

12.

The new generation

Born at a disadvantage

Police against black people

Resistance and rebellion

Appendixes

A.

Letter from Olaudah Equiano to Thomas Hardy, 1792

B.

Letter from William Davidson to Sarah Davidson, 1820

C.

Letter from Robert Wedderburn to Francis Place, 1831

D.

William Cuffay’s speech from the dock, 1848

E.

J.R. Archer’s presidential address to the inaugural meeting of the African Progress Union, 1918

F.

Birmingham, the metal industries, and the slave trade

G.

Eighteenth-century biographies

H.

Visitors, 1832-1919

I.

Prize-fighters, 1791-1902

Notes

Suggestions for further reading

Index