The Black London Emonograph Series Black Britannia

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The Black London eMonograph series Black Britannia

By Thomas L Blair, editor and publisher

Publishing information

Black Britannia: From slavery to freedom in the 18th century Thomas L Blair ISBN 978-1-908480-18-7

No part of this publication and series may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the written permission of the author and copyright holder. The greatest care has been taken in producing this publication; however, the author will endeavour to acknowledge any errors or omissions.

The Black London eMonograph series

Key writings on African and Caribbean peoples in the nation‟s capital by Prof Thomas L Blair.

Well researched, theoretically informed and policy related.

Titles range from The Shaping of Black London to the first Black settlers in the 18th century to today‟s denizens of the metropolis.

My work is supported by decades of scholarly and action research on race, city planning, community development and regeneration. Major publications can be accessed at the British Library http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=1&frbg=&scp. scps=scope%3A%28BLCONTENT%29&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1385312994646&s rt=rank&ct=search&mode=Basic&vl(488279563UI0)=any&dum=true&indx=1&t b=t&vl(freeText0)=thomas%20l%20blair&vid=BLVU1&fn=search&fromLogin=tr ueia

Relevant research monographs from 1968-1997 appear in Thom Blair.org.uk http://www.thomblair.org Click Thomas L Blair Collected Works/MON (or search).

The publications include The Tiers Monde in the City; The City Poverty Committee; PCL-Habitat Forum. The Condition of England Question; Informatiion-based Report on Ethnic Minorities in London Docklands; Area- based projects in Districts of High Immigrant Concentration in Europe; and The Unquiet Zone: Planning Renewal in Post-war Social Housing Areas of Black and Ethnic Concentration in Inner London (Deptford).

Together, Prof Blair‟s work is credited as a significant continuous study of Black Londoners. It is a boon to educators, policy makers, community and heritage archivists and problem-solvers. http://socialwelfare.bl.uk/subject- areas/services-activity/community- development/pub_index.aspx?PublisherID=149777&PublisherName=Editions+Bl air

Notes on the Author

Thomas L Blair, PhD, FRSA, is a social science writer on the creative renewal of Black communities in urban society. His themes of community development and regeneration are cited in the archives of the British Library Social Welfare Portal.

The Black London eMonograph series benefits from research undertaken for an MA degree and Urban Studies Fellowship at Goldsmiths College, University of

London, in the 1990s. Evidence was gathered through seminars, conferences and fieldwork in inner city housing areas of Lewisham, southeast London, and widespread coverage of the media and official reports.

Prof Blair has held professorships at UK and American universities, is well-known as a cyber-scholar, publisher of Editions Blair series editionsblair.eu, and edits the pioneering Black Experience web sites founded in 1997 http://www.chronicleworld.org and http://chronicleworld.wordpress.com

Thomas L Blair Series Editor and publisher November 2013

Cover Photograph by TLB, “New day at Brixton London Underground Station”

Acknowledgements Black Britannica, a volume in the Black London eMonograph series, has benefited from both information professionals and web designers. Thanks are due to Jennie Grimshaw, Leading Curator, Social Policy and Official Publications, The British Library. Web designer David Stockman was instrumental in shaping the format and presentation of the digital text.

Black Britannia Roots in 18th Century London

Thomas L. Blair

Black Britannia delivers research on the first generation of Blacks who shook the slavers’ capital in the 18th century. It restores the historical conditions that changed a people and the Metropolis of the Empire.

Early African and Caribbean settlers are the focus. However, Black Britannia raises issues of conflict and change on two dynamic levels. It helps to understand the triumphs and travails facing ex-colonial peoples of colour in globalising London. And, it challenges historians and policymakers to review and rewrite their euro-centric urban histories.

Glossary

“Black” is variously used to apply to (a) African, Afro-Caribbean and African American persons, and or (b) to apply to all persons of Negro descent or people of mixed Negro and Caucasian and other ethnic descent. Contemporary sources also included as “Black” the Lascar seamen and other persons originating from South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

“Slave” is used here to apply to Black peoples who were bound in servitude as instruments of labour as the property of a slaveholder or household. Slaves were a central element of the tri-continental or triangular trade system and chattel slavery which had unprecedented importance for social, economic, cultural and moral society in Britain, and in Africa and the Caribbean.

“Slavery” is defined as a form of “institutionalised domination over persons who have no property or birth rights…and who are subject to control in all aspects of their lives, with no enforceable limits” (Collins Dictionary 1991: 571).

“Free Blacks” or “freedmen” applies to slaves who were manumitted and born free; and to those who gained their own freedom by desertion or flight.

Table of contents

Glossary

The London Found: heart of the empire and the slave trade

The First Black Londoners: Africans and West Indians transformed in the city, economy and society

Shaping their life experiences: from hovels to palatial mansions

Freedomways: their demand for equality and justice marked the transition from slavery to freedom

Rising Tide of Black Radicalism: Black action for all workers and colonial peoples is an enduring legacy

Conclusion: The first Black Londoners birthed a positive identity and communal perspective. They were in the anti-slavery vanguard. Professionals and workers rallied for all proletarians, “Black or white, slave or free”. Of lasting value, Black seafarers linked dockside communities with the global outposts of the African diaspora.

Bibliography: Evidence is based on the canonical works of writers and historians compiled in the reference bibliography ______

The London Found

The growth of Black urban communities was a major phenomenon of 18th century London, the burgeoning capital of world commerce and the slave trade. Close examination of the origins, occupations and settlements of newcomers from Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas reveals a distinctive pattern of Black experience in the metropolitan heart of the empire.

The Black presence in London spans many centuries, from Black soldiers in Roman encampments astride the Thames, to musicians to the court in medieval palaces, to the first Africans introduced into England in the late 1500s. But it was during the 18th century that Blacks became familiar sights on the streets of London, cast there by the historical forces that the British themselves, the great slave trader of the world, had set into motion.

The London they found had grown rich from slavery and the sugar trade. It is said that:

“Between 1700 and 1780 English foreign trade nearly doubled; it trebled during the next twenty years. Shipping doubled too, ….All this great increase in our treasure proceeds chiefly from the labour of negroes in the plantations,‟ said Joshua Gee in 1729, with a frankness that few historian have emulated” (Hill 1969:226-27).

Though no single definition applies to this burgeoning capital City on the Thames, it was a pattern of bricks and mortar produced by the wealth, taste and industry of a great age (Summerson mcmxlvii: dust jacket). It was the time of Georgian London, an epoch encompassed by the ascendancy of George I and the demise of George IV, when architects and builders created new urban workshops and townscapes of markets, shops and churches, and architectural styles. Town life was a desirable feature of this new urbanity and masses of workers sustained the wealthy elites with their labour (Gray 1978: 201; cf. Trevelyan 1942: Ch.XIII).

In time, sprawling districts of workers, servants and slaves served the growing city and its port traffic. London of that day was like a boiling steam kettle, says one writer “though the gentry, by and large, were sitting on the lid” and

“What one was born to, in London, included: ordure left lying in the streets, broken pavements, ruinous houses, the driving of bullocks through the city, the prevalence of mad dogs, the gin shops, the swarms of beggars, the deluge of profanity and street-cries” (Boswell 1980: Introduction xii).

In the suburbs a handful of aristocrats had their isolated palaces. In the built-up areas most people lived in narrow terraced houses. The poor, unemployed and criminal classes had their squalid hovels and centuries-old rookeries. Poverty and its consequences among the labouring classes were everywhere suppressed

by a harsh regime of control punishment and public executions (Linebaugh 1991: Introduction passim).

The London found was also a place of popular attitudes and learned concepts that claimed Blacks were inferior beings. Learned men of the 18th century, almost without academic dissent, were unanimous in their thinking that Africans were intellectually inferior to Europeans (Fryer 1984:150-53).

John Locke, who held a £600 investment in the Royal African Company, “managed to reconcile a belief in the inalienable rights of man with the view that Black slavery was a justifiable institution”. Sir William Petty, one of the founders of the Royal Society wrote that among other physical traits “They differ also in their Naturall Manners & in the internall Qualities of their Minds” David Hume, considered a great Scottish philosopher, wrote

“There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation…..here are NEGROE slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity….In JAMAICA indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but „tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly”

Throughout the century, no area of life, economic, social, intellectual and moral, was unaffected by slavery, or buttressed by hostile racial attitudes. London, its docks, warehouses, and finance centres, its palaces, wealthy homes and squalid hovels of the poor, depended on the three-cornered trade in human and material cargo between British ships, African coastal states, the plantations of the Caribbean and the Americas.

The First Black Londoners

The Black community in 18th century London was forged by their race-class status in the urban economy and society. Closer investigation of their population size, origins, work and residence and spatial distribution reveal distinctive patterns of the Black urban experience.

Population

Its size – was the most striking aspect of Black London in the 18th century. London contained the largest concentration of Black people in Britain; larger, that is, than Liverpool, Bristol and Cardiff the other important slave port cities.

Scholars says that “The London Black community consisted of between 10,000 and 20,000 people – 6-7 per cent of the population” (Linebaugh 1993:349). It must be noted however that this can only be taken as an approximation. They have still to determine the exact size of Britain‟s Black population, and distribution throughout the country.

The best information until the 1750s is gleaned from royal proclamations, parish registers of births, marriages, deaths and burials, court depositions and casual observations, leaflets offering slaves for sale, and advertisements for runaways. “The paucity and peculiarities of the evidence”, says one senior historian place grave constraints on research efforts (Walvin 1992: 234). Nevertheless, these varied sources provide

“a fuller picture of Black people than we might reasonably expect to get in a society which, for much of the time before the nineteenth century, consigned them to the anonymous level of inanimate property” (Walvin 1992:228).

Glimpses of the Blacks in London are also evident in English art of the period which provides a valuable social record. Judging from their widespread appearance in the works of Hogarth, Zoffany, Rowlandson, Gillray, Cruickshank and others, Blacks were very much a part of white society in the aristocratic households as well as in the subculture of the lower classes (Dabydeen 1992 passim).

Diverse Origins

The second striking aspect is the extent of the diversity of Black Londoners. Africa was of course home to all. Some however came directly from Africa; while others came via the Caribbean with a spectrum of identities based on African, European, Asian, and native American cultural heritages. Both streams were interlaced with a multitude of religions, cultural and linguistic heritages, and experiences (Fraser 1993:51). In large part they were young males taken from their homelands, their parents and ethnic groups and bound together as exiles of

the slave trade in London. Inevitably they were affected by a deep “loss of family” which nothing would assuage. In one lament an African wrote of his beloved sister “Though you were early forced from my arms, your image has always been rivetted in my heart, from which neither time nor fortune have been able to remove it” (Edwards and Dabydeen 1991:xiii).

New work and occupational classes

The first groups of Blacks arrived in small numbers as sailors on Atlantic crossings. Others were brought over as personal servants or slaves. In the early decades of the century their numbers increased and there was greater differentiation in the occupations and status positions of people within the communities.

Domestic Service

Service to the upper and middle classes was one of the largest occupations among Blacks. Their numbers grew as wealthy families enriched by the African Caribbean slave trade brought their slave servants to London. As one writer states “Accustomed to a lifestyle dependent on cheap serving people in the new colonies, settlers and their families travelled with their slaves” (Anim-Addo 1995:26). Black domestics, including little Black page boys, were considered an extra cachet which helped to “effect the luxury and refinement of the upper classes” (Linebaugh 1991:248). They were slaves no less however and “they even wore a badge of slavery in the form of a silver collar” (Cunnington and Lucas 1967: 177).

In time Black “slave-servants” achieved positions intermediate between chattel slavery and domestic service, with varying degrees of privilege. Favoured positions were as pages, valets, footmen, coachmen, cooks and butlers. Black women worked as laundry maids, seamstresses, and children‟s nurses. But in addition to domestic service Black people occupied a range of other status or occupational groups.

Freedom Strivers and Impoverished Blacks

Slowly there developed a growing number of men and women who had been freed from bondage (manumitted) or were born free, or who gained their freedom by flight from their employers. Many of them lived a precarious existence. “In escaping from the material security of their masters‟ homes, many of the Blacks found, not merely their freedom, but the poverty which was the common lot of a large proportion of London‟s population” (Edwards and Walvin 1983:25).

Free Blacks in the urban job market bore a special burden, that of colour prejudice and discrimination. Blacks were not thought suitable for education for a trade and there is evidence of the earliest employment colour bar. By proclamation of the Lord Mayor of London in 1731 Blacks were prohibited from apprenticeships in guilds and trades associations (Fryer 1984: 74-75).

The Black Poor

Out of this situation a new social group emerged at the lowest levels of the social hierarchy. Called the London Black Poor they were impoverished, hired servants and slaves that could not meet parish residential requirements and had no entitlement to pauper relief (Fryer 1984: 170).

In addition, Black”beggars” were a common sight. Many of them developed their talents as street entertainers. Some, like the one-legged King Billy Waters, were familiar figures and amassed tidy fortunes performing in the fashionable West End of London. However, the mass of beggars hustled on the streets as casual itinerant market labourers and street crossing sweepers. Unemployed Dockers and seamen lived on handouts for their meagre supper.

Penniless “Black Loyalists swelled their numbers after 1783. These were Black American recruits who fought for the British in return for promises of freedom. Shipped to Britain at the end of the American Revolution, many were reduced to starving on the streets (Fryer 1984: 191).

By mid-1786 there were 1,144 Black Poor living in the streets of London (Fryer 1984: 194). Some of these were young men on the run. As writer stated “To be young, Black, and on the run meant scraping an existence at the very bottom of the social heap” (Fryer 1984: 74). Many of them banded together in the East End of London in hovels, where they gave shelter and assistance to other Blacks.

Transitional status

Towards the end of the century the status of domestic slaves changed into that of servants. Nevertheless many ran away; some bought or gained their freedom and by the end of the century lived as free people.

London had a large share of these men and women of transition. They earned their living as labourers and craftsmen, and in a myriad of occupations: small traders, actors, fencing instructors, ordained ministers, street musicians, lovers, layabouts, prostitutes, and hairdressers (Fryer 1984: 75-76). Some of them worked on the dock side and on ships as valets and cooks; others as musicians and regimental bandsmen in the British Army.

Esteemed Personalities

Slowly, a respected and accepted Black leadership and public intellectuals emerged. They were lauded for their assimilation to, and integration in, the ranks of London society. Literacy, oratory and the command of the English language was the key to their success. Some were educated in schools aboard the warships on which they had served; others received tuition from friends or at their employer‟s expense.

It is said that by the end of the century there was a considerable literate Black population and the beginnings of a significant “ body of Afro-British writing, autobiographical and polemical” (Edwards and Dabydeen 1991: x).

Judged by their acculturation to metropolitan life, the esteemed Blacks were among the first to benefit from rights granted by whites. They were also undoubtedly the most favoured on the contemporary scale of wages, customary perquisites and consumption standards.

History records well-known personalities and writers ranging from the stylish narratives of Ignatius Sancho to the politically influential letters of Olaudah Equiano (Fryer 1984: 207; Edwards and Dabydeen 1991: 54).

Ignatius Sancho, born a slave in 1729 and brought to England at aged two, rose from slave to man of letters. He saw the aristocratic life of Georgian London from both inside and outside the manor house of the Duke of Montagu. In his notable life, Sancho rose from valet to fashionable grocer, dramatist, musician, and renowned letter-writer to Laurence Sterne and powerful personalities of his day – and was the first recorded Black voter in Britain. (Sancho‟s World:1997; and titles in the bibliography).

Olaudah Equiano, born in Nigeria circa 1750, was kidnapped into the slave trade and brought to England. After working as a servant, coalminer and ships steward he became an effective speaker and lobbyist in the struggle against slavery. He published the narrative of his life in 1789 which went through 14 editions. He left an estate valued at “tens of thousands in modern money values”.

Francis Barber, scholar, seaman and servant to Samuel Johnson, features in a portrait by Gainsborough and ended his days as a respected schoolmaster (Cf. Boswell 1980 passim). His association with the most famous literary figure of the 18th century led to “a far better style of composition and address than would commonly have been found among white servants of his own standing” (Dabydeen et al:40).

George Bridgetower was a musician of African parentage who came to London as a child prodigy, and became first violinist in the Prince of Wales‟ orchestra, and was admired by Beethoven. Black personalities of the era also included Billy Waters an ex-sailor and wily exponent of street begging for survival, and prize- fighters such as Joe Leashley, Massa Kendrick and James Wharton (Edwards and Dabydeen, and Fryer ibid.; Fraser 1995: 55)

Shaping life experiences

The forging of 18th century Black communities had much to do with where they lived and worked. By virtue of their varied occupations Blacks would have lived in a range of living situations from palatial mansions to the humblest hovels.

Elegant Homes

Black domestic servants, house workers, and handsomely clothed retainers were a common sight in the homes of wealthier classes. Evidence of their presence is found in the many portraits of aristocratic families and their Black pages with silver collars, jewelled ear lobes, and silk and lace garments. Black domestics could be found in the elegant homes of the rich in fashionable areas of Westminster, and in Haymarket and Covent Garden along the Strand or Bloomsbury to the west of the city. Others lived in the homes of wealthy merchants in the eastern suburbs like Wapping and Shadwell.

Hovels, Infills and Suburbs

Whether east or west there were many Blacks who lived in the infill settlements around the better off homes, in the ribbon developments along major roads and along the waterfronts, and in the vast agglomerations of suburban tenements. Undoubtedly others, would have occupied jerry-built row houses or the ramshackle dwellings built by squatters and the homeless unable to afford rented accommodation.

History records a number of notable Black settlements.

“There is said to have been a concentration of destitute Black people in the St Giles or Seven Dials district, then on London‟s northern outskirts; it was a mass of insanitary hovels where beggars, whores, criminals and other outcasts congregated”. The Black people lived in unfashionable riverside hamlets of Ratcliff (as early as 1690) and Limehouse (long before any Chinese settled there), and local tradition has it that two riverside inns at Wapping were used as markets for the sale of Black youths as domestic servants” (Fryer 1984:75)

Deptford in southeast London on the Thames provides another example of the Black presence in London. Deptford was a significant port for the slave trade with Africa and the Caribbean. The pirates and adventurers, who crossed the oceans in search of gold and slaves, returned to build manor houses served by Black domestics. The growth in numbers reflected the Britain‟s increased involvement with slavery and the slave trade. In the late 17th century naval vessels sailed to and from the Caribbean carrying slaves of planters, merchants, naval personnel. Olaudah Equiano was resold into slavery at Deptford, and the

young Ignatius Sancho learned his style and manners in a duke‟s home in Blackheath. Nevertheless, the mass of Deptford‟s Blacks, unlike their fellows on the north side of the river, were relatively isolated in their employment opportunities, and served largely as servants in wealthy homes.(Anim-Addo 1995:passim).

Dockside workers’ communities

By far the largest grouping of London‟s Blacks was among working populations on the north dock sides of the Thames. There they eked out a precarious existence in the burgeoning urban economy based on the slave trade. Black river workers toiled with other “foreigners” – people born outside the capital and its environs. They worked alongside Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen, and migrants from all over Europe as temporary labourers shifting from job to job, portering, running errands, rolling barrels. This pastiche of differing cultures was one crucial aspect of the international capital and commerce that centred on London (see Fryer p.75).

Freedomways

These social and demographic factors – size, diverse origins, occupations and settlements – provide a necessary but insufficient basis for understanding of Black life in Georgian London. The missing ingredient is their quest for freedom.

Toppling the Edifice of Urban Slavery

Broadly slavery was the order of the day and slaves were unequal before the law, with limited privileges and movement, geographically and occupationally. This edifice of slavery was supported by formal government policies and by the popular attitudes and views of slave owners, employers, guilds and voluntary associations.

Blacks were in large part in statuses formally segregated from the wider society as a whole. On one lower level, they were informally accepted within, but not necessarily fused with, the subordinate classes of Georgian London. Higher up the scale, they were better off sheltered in the homes and good graces of the wealthy.

However, ordinary Blacks held dockside, ship-bound occupations of drudgery and toil, lightened occasionally by activities on the streets and in the brothels, pubs playhouses. In large part, they were an invisible domestic army, working wherever they could by day and sheltering in each other‟s quarters at night.

Though probably Blacks lived in all the major populated areas of the city, they were often found in deprived quarters and insalubrious streets.

Yet, despite these inauspicious circumstances and restrictions there developed a tenacious love of liberty and a quest for emancipation which marked the Black experience. Central to this, within the Black community, there was a sense of self-hood. Indeed, “A consciousness of racial affinity, and a background of common experience, were the principal unifying bonds in the Black community (Fryer 1984: 205).

Culture contact and social change

Nevertheless, new roles and behaviours marked the changes were apparent. Black workers and domestic servants adapted to the urban processes of work, residence and leisure. There were transformations in cultural patterns: speech and manners, food tastes, dress, song and dance. Moreover, Black people developed linkages of thought and action to the main issues and trends of the society. Thus, Black leaders and their allies learned to use the social system to their advantage.

Clearly, Blacks developed coping strategies and organisations, societies and caucuses to maintain group cohesion, and to attain status in the urban political arena. In this process their images of themselves were reformed into a new coherent system enabling individuals to deal with the triumphs and the travails of daily life (cf. Gundara and Duffield; Gates; Shyllon; Walvin and others).

International and Pan-African Links

Significantly, Black communities used the premier symbol of the masters‟ might – the ship -- to spread their own liberatory information. London‟s riverside Black workers and seamen were, of course, a significant proportion of all seamen on British ships. Through them, trans-oceanic, pan-African networks of culture and intelligence linked communities with their fellows in all the Atlantic African, American and Caribbean ports.

In a dramatic fashion, historians re-interpreting this period speak of the unusual nature of these Black alliances.

“By twentieth-century standards, let alone the standards of their own time, they were among the first genuine citizens of the world with experience of Africa, the Americas and Europe. A few sailors among them had also travelled to the East. Their strident independence amidst circumstances of legal oppression, impoverishment and racist harassment also made them among the first citizens of the new world coming into being in these decades of revolution” Lorimer 1992:74-75).

In London, alliances were formed across the various Black groups. They also found common cause with South Asian Lascar seamen who served on British ships and Indian domestics who like Blacks of the century were considered a status symbol in white households (Visram 1993).

This rising new subculture of Black solidarity and liberation struck fear in the slave-owners who were frightened of the prospect of the export of insurrection through Britain and the colonies. Sir John Fielding, a London magistrate in 1768 expressed their fears that sending slaves who had tasted freedom back to the colonised posed a grave danger:

“there is Reason to fear that those Blacks who have been sent back to the Plantations, after they have lived some Time in this Country of Liberty, where they have learned to read and write, have been acquainted with the Use, and entrusted with the Care of Arms, have been Occasion of those Insurrections that have been lately caused and threatened such Mischiefs and Dangers to the Inhabitants of, and Planters in the Islands of the West Indies….” Lorimer 1992:61).

Fatefully, and paradoxically, Blacks had transformed the master‟s symbol of his power and oppression into an interactive communication media for themselves.

The ship was the conduit of a counterculture of liberation in a world system of capitalism and slavery. The ship and its Black crews were the means by which news of slave rebellions on the plantations and urban colonial insurrections in the West Indies and the great revolution of the century in Haiti were received. They transmitted the angry voices crying for freedom and multiplied them like thundering drumbeats from ship to shore across the seas.

On a wider front, Black communities and their far-flung networks were part of an “international nautical proletariat”, a “common band of humanity” – often an unruly, independent, mutinous lot --which challenged the bastions of international capital that centred on London (Linebaugh:67).

Rising Tide of Black Radicalism

There is another wider issue to which the Black experience is relevant. As we have seen, the evolution of the Black community took place under fundamentally unequal social conditions. They were doomed, it seemed, to perpetual slavery or a precarious existence on the edge of white society.

Black sailors together with whites were a fellowship of seafarers, but on sea and land, whites claimed the higher levels of the emerging proletariat.

Furthermore, Blacks were normally debarred from occupations as mechanics and artisans, and excluded by law from apprenticeships. They could not become market traders, weavers, coal-heavers, tanners, and brewers‟ draymen.

Inequalities plagued Black domestic servants. By contrast, white domestic servants had several advantages. Their terms of service were limited to only one year. This legal status freed them from the absolute power of their masters. Furthermore, it guaranteed a wage income they could use as independent households.

Facing these inequalities, Blacks took action on two important fronts. One was gaining comparable conditions of labour and pay to white seafarers, workers and domestics, and establishing a free, legal status. The other was the demand for freedom from indebtedness, bondage and exclusion -- the key they believed to a fuller, more just and rewarding city life.

Legal Redress

At the grassroots, Black London‟s slaves engaged in many battles, covert and openly, to assert their rights to freedom. They demanded wages which for them certified a free status and the right of residence within a parish (Fryer: 204). Furthermore, they used the courts and legal arguments to establish and protect their liberty and rights. As one historian has pointed out:

“Along with the eighteenth-century white English population, Blacks showed a readiness to use the law of their social superiors for the pursuit of their own independent ends” (Lorimer 1992:61).

Resistance and Flight

Protest and the search for change in their intolerable circumstances took many forms: resistance, flight, and myriad skirmishes on the streets and at work. Advertisements of rewards for runaway slaves revealed the tenor of the times. For example:

“Went away the 22nd last, from the house of William Webb in Limehouse Hole, a negro man, about 20 years old, called Dick, yellow complexion, wool hair, about five feet six inches, having on his right breast the word „Hare‟ burnt. Whoever brings him to the said Mr. Webb‟s shall have half-a- guinea reward and reasonable charges” (Lorimer 1992:59). 18

Such advertisements were all too common in The Times:

“Absconded. An…indented Black servant lad named Toney, aged about 19…very Black and slender made. He went off in a striped dressing jacket, …waistcoat and breeches, ribbed cotton stockings, shoes and plated buckles” Cunnington and Lucas 1967: 177).

Calls were issued to curb the “disobedient character of Black slaves” who

“cease to consider themselves as slaves in this free country, nor will they put up with an inequality of treatment, nor more willingly perform the laborious offices of servitude than our own people, and if put to it, are generally sullen, spiteful, treacherous and revengeful” (Lorimer 1992: 60).

Fears were expressed that Black caucuses and societies of fugitives “make it their Business to corrupt and dissatisfy the Mind of every fresh Black Servant that comes to England” (Lorimer 1992:60).

In carrying out these acts many runaway Blacks found shelter among the English working classes. Moreover, as Walvin points out “ the plebeian whites of the London rookeries to which so many slaves successfully absconded, for far from co-operating with their would-be apprehenders, they commonly obstructed them” (Walvin in Gundara and Duffield :236)

Black Leadership in the Abolition Movement

These restless struggles had the important effect of raising the question of the status of Blacks in England to the level of public conscience and debate (Lorimer 1992: 58).

Classic studies of the abolitionist movement stress the role of eminent English humanitarians and jurists like Granville Sharp and Lord Mansfield. However, historians today recognise and place greater emphasis on two essential aspects of the Black experience.

First, the demand for and achievement of wage payment which would help them to gain certified free status and parish residence, a necessary condition under the Poor Law.

Second, it is now recognised the Black community were a militant force that mobilised public opinion for the abolitionist cause. A re-examination of these struggles between the 1760s and 1790s “suggests that Blacks had some success 19

in resisting slavery and racism, and thus were active historical agents altering, if not solely determining, their own rights and status” (Lorimer 1992:59).

Leaders and spokesmen for the Black community made a significant contribution to the self-emancipation of Black people, and also to the radical history of Britain and its working class movements (Cf. Gilroy: 12ff; Linebaugh passim; Edwards and Dabydeen passim). Ottobah Cugoano, who was born 1757 in Ghana and served as a slave in Grenada, denounced slavery and spoke out for the poor who should be able to live “without being oppressed and screwed down to work for nothing”(Linebaugh : 348-9; 415). Olaudah Equiano, who was born in Nigeria and worked on plantations in Barbados and Virginia, was a leading London activist for antislavery and social reform movements. Despite his lack of recognition in histories of the period he can be considered a prime contributor to the making of the working class in England (Linebaugh: 415-16)

Two African Americans, John Glover and Benjamin Bowsey, actively participated in the Gordon riots of June 1780, a municipal insurrection which highlighted themes of slavery, wage-payment, and criminalisation of the poor (Linebaugh: 348ff).

A Jamaican, Robert Wedderburn, was another prime contributor to early working class history. He was born in Jamaica in 1761 of a wealthy Scottish Jamaican and a slave woman, and migrated to London at the age of 17 years. He sought to advance the rights of slaves to slay their masters in defence of their freedom, and was considered an ultra-radical, anarchist, Jacobin and Methodist heretic.

Moreover, William Cuffay, who was the son of slave parents (free after arrival in England in 1788), was a member of the first working class movement, the ill- fated Chartist movement, suffered transportation to the colonies for his radical activities.

Together these Black political firebrands pressed the case for resistance to the excesses of early capitalism. They pledged allegiance to a new fraternal creed. They called for the liberation of Black and white across race-class barriers. They rallied for the unity of all wage slaves whether on plantations or in factories. Therefore, they fuelled the insurrectionary impulse within British working class and social reform movements (Cf. Williams and Gilroy).

Conclusion: 7 features of the first Black Londoners

We are accustomed to think of Blacks and the slave system as a rural activity and located on some far-off shores. Yet from almost the beginning British slavery was also urban and metropolitan, central and global. London and the major British port cities, Cardiff, Liverpool, and Bristol, each had its complement of slaves in chains and collars, arriving or departing. Contemporary commentators considered city slaves as much a part of the slave system as those who toiled in the New World plantation fields and mansions.

This eMonograph has identified key aspects of Black communities in 18th century London, their origins, size, occupations, and settlements. It has also discussed key themes in the Black urban experience and their relationship with wider contemporary issues.

Blacks in Georgian London were irrevocably tied to the system of capitalism and slavery. The city was a huge arena of socialisation not only for engagement with metropolitan society but also for the formation of a positive and paramount Black perspective. Recurring features

Black Britannia focuses on the Black urban experience in the 18th century. Seven features merit further investigation:

1) The major feature was the mass transition of African and Caribbean newcomers into the lower ranks and status levels of a metropolitan economy and society. Their mobility was restricted by a social structure ranked by regional, class, and race factors. 2) The continuous and close interplay, formal and intimate, of Blacks with English classes was another feature. In the process, they absorbed and contributed to metropolitan culture, technical, musical, political, legal and literary. 3) Furthermore, the new Black Londoners created strong institutions based on origin, background, kith and kin, and co-religion. Their associations embraced all Black peoples with a common heritage of exclusion, whether born in Britain or abroad, slave or free. Their struggle for freedom ultimately fuelled abolitionist and proletarian movements. 4) Moreover, the new Black Londoners created political caucuses and organisations to aggressively assert their demands. They promoted self-help and mutual aid groups to resist the alienating effects of urban and economic life. 5) Black communities and seafarers showed a remarkable ability to organise networks of support and communication across widely dispersed Black settlements in Britain and around the Black world.

6) Thus, Black communities consolidated individual acts of bravery into group solidarity, and created effective political alliances within the gentry, the working classes and radical social movements. 7) Finally, Black slave narrators, diarists, and musicians chronicled the life and times of Black people and established a cultural heritage.

Guidelines for new British Black Historical Studies

Black Britannia‟s seven features support the new demands for studying Black History. Scholars of the “new British Black Historical studies” are agreed:

“the demands of Black history are stimulated not merely by abstract intellectual interest but also by the determination on the part of many people to use history as a tool to understand the present” (Walvin in Gundara and Duffield 1992: 225).

Therefore, how the first Black communities coped and adapted in the hostile Metropolis of the Empire is important and rewarding. Studying their survival and legacy will uncover a rich vein of heritage data relevant to later centuries. This will challenge scholars and policy makers to rethink and rewrite euro-centric versions of Black and British urban history.

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