Scholarship on the historical black presence in Britain tends to dwell on the 18th century: the era of the slave trade, a consequence of which was the huge number of black people brought to Britain to work for aristocrats, merchants and anyone rich enough to buy such people at public auctions held in taverns and coffee houses. The documentation of their lives is plentiful, enhanced by the testimonies of former slaves such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano.The rise of great cities such as Liverpool and Bristol can also be linked to the revenues from slavery. David Olusoga, Nick Draper and others have unearthed thousands of British individuals and families who benefited from investments in the African body. No account of the social and economic development of 18th-century Britain is complete without recognition of the contribution of Africans enslaved in Britain and the Caribbean.
Miranda Kaufmann’s book, however, reaches back further to tell the stories of black Tudors. It is not only groundbreaking, but also a gripping set of portraits of ten Africans, selected from the hundreds discovered through patient searching through parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials; municipal records; tax returns; wills and inventories; household accounts and other miscellaneous, often obscure or overlooked archival materials. As Kaufmann writes, “no one has yet trawled the entire corpus of 16th- and 17th-century documents” for evidence of the black presence. There are, for example, nearly a million probate inventories that survive for the period around 1580-1720. “These lists of objects, from livestock to armour, chamber-pots to musical instruments, provide an intimate insight into the daily lives and material culture of ordinary people.”
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