Abstract
The African diaspora, the enforced scattering of millions of black Africans from their homelands, mostly to the far side of the Atlantic, resulted in the growth of black communities throughout the western world. The main subject of this book is one such community, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, with particular attention being paid to the emergence of certain individuals within that community. However, though this dispersal occurred principally during and after the sixteenth century in the era of the slave trade, we propose to begin with the presence of Africans in Britain in earlier times.
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Notes and References
David Magie (ed.), Scriptores Historiae Augustae (London, 1922), I. pp. 424–7.
For the troop of Moorish auxiliaries stationed at Burgh-on-Sands, see Anthony R. Birley, Septimius Severusç The African Emperor (London 1971), pp. 265–6;
Frank M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 142–3; and for archaeological evidence, see
Roger Warwick, ‘The Skeletal Remains’, in L. P. Wenham, The Romano-British Cemetery at Trentholme (London, 1968), pp. 111–76.
John O’Donovan (ed.), Annals of Ireland (Dublin, 1860), p. 162, entered under ‘Three Fragments Copied from Ancient Sources’ by Donald MacFirbis.
Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (London, 1965), p. 10; p. 49; and see Note 38.
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S. L. Bethell, ‘Diabolic Images in Othello’, Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952), p. 77;
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See H. W. Debrunner, Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe (Basel, 1979), pp. 33–63.
E. Welsford, The Fool (London, 1935), p. 170;
J. A. Rogers, Nature Knows No Colour Line (New York, 1952), p. 161; Portrait of Anne of Denmark, 1617, by Paul van Somer, National Portrait Gallery, London.
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Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India (London, 1655); see also Debrunner, Presence p. 58.
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W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law (London, 1926), IX. p. 112.
H. T. Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro 5 vols. (Washington, 1926), I. p. 9.
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© 1983 Paul Edwards and James Walvin
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Edwards, P., Walvin, J. (1983). Africans in Britain Before the Eighteenth Century. In: Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04043-8_1
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