Suggestions for further reading

This book does not include a formal bibliography. Readers who want more information about a particular person or event will often find relevant books and articles listed in the notes. Thus, for instance, those interested in reading more about Marcus Garvey will find some of the literature about him listed in note 67 on page 564 above. These guides to further reading, which make no pretension to completeness, are identified as such in the index.

The following suggestions are intended for readers who need guidance of a more general nature.

Earlier general histories should not be neglected. Nigel File and Chris Power, Black Settlers in Britain 1555-1958 (Heinemann Educational Books, 1981), though primarily intended for school pupils, has had a deservedly wide sale to older people, too: it is clearly written, well illustrated, and furnished with helpful brief guides to further information. Its shortcomings are noted by Chris Mullard in Immigrants & Minorities, II/1 (March 1983), 89-90. Kenneth Little’s pioneering Negroes in Britain (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1947) is still of great value. Edward Scobie’s Black Britannia: A history of blacks in Britain (Chicago, Johnson Publishing Co., 1972) and James Walvin’s Black and White: The Negro and English Society 1555-1945 (Allen Lane, 1973) are stimulating, though both should be used with caution, as should Walvin’s The Black Presence: a documentary history of the Negro in England, 1550-1860 (Orbach & Chambers, 1971).

For the eighteenth century, F.O.Shyllon’s Black People in Britain 1555-1833 (Oxford University Press for Institute of Race Relations, 1977) is a rich mine of information, as is his earlier and better-organized Black Slaves in Britain (Oxford University Press for Institute of Race Relations, 1974), to which chapter 6 of this book owes a considerable debt. These are now joined by Paul Edwards and James Walvin, Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade (Macmillan, 1983), which unfortunately I did not see until I had finished work on this book. For the mid-nineteenth century, Douglas A. Lorimer’s Colour, Class and the Victorians (Leicester University Press, 1978) is thoughtful and suggestive.

The Pan-African movement and its connections with Britain are discussed in two books that should be read in conjunction: J. A. Langley’s Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa 1900-1945 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973) and Imanuel Geiss’s The Pan-African Movement (Methuen, 1974), a translation of a work first published in German in 1968.

Several biographies and autobiographies of interest are referred to in the notes above, and others are promised. Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures has been edited by Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee (Falling Wall Press, 1984); Ian Duffield is working on a biography of Dusé Mohamed Ali; C.L.R. James’s promised autobiography will be one of the major publishing events of the decade. Owen Charles Mathurin’s Henry Sylvester Williams and the Origins of the Pan-African Movement, 1869-1911 (Westport, Conn. and London, Greenwood Press, 1976) throws much light on the black presence in Britain in the early twentieth century, as does Jeffrey P. Green’s Edmund Thornton Jenkins: The Life and Times of an American Black Composer; 1894-1926 (Westport, Conn. and London, Greenwood Press, 1982). James R. Hooker’s Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (Pall Mall Press, 1967), Ras Makonnen’s Pan-Africanism from Within (Nairobi etc., Oxford University Press, 1973), and Ernest Marke’s engaging Old Man Trouble (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975) together build up a rounded picture of what it was like to be black in Britain during and between the two world wars. Black political thought and activities in Britain in that period are discussed by Cedric J. Robinson in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Zed Press, 1983).

For the years since 1948, the serious student will begin with A.Sivanandan’s Coloured Immigrants in Britain: A Select Bibliography (Institute of Race Relations, Special Series, 1969 and later editions) and Colored Minorities in Great Britain: a comprehensive bibliography, 1970-1977, comp. Raj Madan (Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press; London, Aldwych Press Limited; 1979). To keep up with new publications, it is a good plan to glance through each fresh issue of Sage Race Relations Abstracts, which from time to time carries helpfully annotated reviews of recent literature: see, e.g., Hazel Waters, ‘Guide to the Literature on race relations in Britain 1970-75’, 1/2 (March 1976), 97-105; and Gideon Ben-Tovim and John Gabriel, ‘The politics of race in Britain, 1962 to 1979: A Review of the Major Trends and of the Recent Literature’, IV/4 (November 1979), 1-56.

The economic setting is best approached through Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1944; third impression, André Deutsch, 1972). Those interested in the debate around this book will find some points of departure listed in note 5 on page 542 above.

For the history of black people in Britain as part of the history of black people in Europe as a whole, see Hans Werner Debrunner’s Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe: A History of Africans in Europe before 1918 (Basel, Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 1979), a thorough, scholarly, and well-illustrated labour of love.

Some of the gaps in this cursory reading-list are due to gaps in the literature. There is not yet, for example, a satisfactory history of Asians in Britain. One at least of these gaps will be filled by Ron Ramdin’s forthcoming history of the black working class in Britain.