Abstract
Much of the preceding history of black society had been gleaned from what contemporaries said about it. It would in fact be perfectly possible to reconstruct a history solely from such sources. But the study of white responses to black society demands a much more varied investigation for it takes us not merely into the reactions of whites towards blacks living in Britain but also into the infinitely more complex terrain of racial attitudes themselves. At its most ambitious therefore an analysis of white responses would be, in itself, a history of black—white relations. Clearly, such a study is beyond the scope of the present book. On the other hand it would be unrealistic simply to suggest that British reactions to their black minority were shaped merely, or even largely, by personal contact, fleeting glimpses or more intimate connections forged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To view white reactions solely as a function of short-term relations between black and white would be to miss the point that by the late eighteenth century both black and white communities were the inheritors of an ancient tradition of mutual observation and commentary.
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Notes and References
W. B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans (Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 1–2.
James Walvin, Black and White. The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945 (London, 1973), ch. 3.
Edward Long, ‘History of Jamaica’, (1774) quoted in M. Craton, J. Walvin and D. Wright (eds), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (London, 1976), p. 261
Edward Long, ‘Candid Reflections’, (1772), in J. Walvin, The Black Presence A Documentary History of the Negro in England (London, 1971), p. 68.
See in particular, Anthony J. Barker, The African Link (London, 1978).
P. Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp (London, 1820), p. 333.
J. J. Hecht, Continental and Colonial Servants in 18th century England, ( Northampton, Mass., 1954), p. 47.
See J. Walvin, ‘The public campaign in England against slavery, 1787–1834’, in D. Eltis and J. Walvin, The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Wisconsin, 1981), pp. 63–79.
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London, 1944).
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© 1983 Paul Edwards and James Walvin
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Edwards, P., Walvin, J. (1983). White Responses. In: Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04043-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04043-8_3
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