nsaop.blogg.se

Half of all the millions of Africans carried into slavery in the eighteenth century were transported on British ships. Between 1618, which marked the rise of the British slave trade, and 1807, when the country abolished it, Britain was the premier slave-trading nation in the Atlantic. This island contains the ruins of a fortress that, for over a century, was at the heart of the British slave trade in Africa.įrom that fortress, tens of thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped to plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas. Shortlisted for the inaugural Jhalak Prize.There’s an island at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River in West Africa called Bunce Island. Winner of the Longman History Today Trustees’ Award. Winner of the 2017 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. Unflinching, confronting taboos, and revealing hitherto unknown scandals, Olusoga describes how the lives of black and white Britons have been entwined for centuries. It is not a singular history, but one that belongs to us all. Black British history is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation.

It shows that the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery, and that black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of both World Wars. It is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation and it belongs to us all.ĭrawing on new genealogical research, original records, and expert testimony, Black and British reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination, Elizabethan ‘blackamoors’ and the global slave-trading empire. Black and British is vivid confirmation that black history can no longer be kept separate and marginalised. This edition, fully revised and updated, features a new chapter encompassing the Windrush scandal and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, events which put black British history at the centre of urgent national debate. In this vital re-examination of a shared history, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing story of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean. Written with a wonderful clarity of style and with great force and passion.' – Kwasi Kwarteng, Sunday Times ' comprehensive and important history of black Britain.