England’s Other Countrymen: Black Tudor Society

370 Pages·2019·26.432 MB·English

by  Onyeka Nubia

ENGLAND’S OTHER
COUNTRYMEN
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ENGLAND’S OTHER
COUNTRYMEN
Black Tudor Society
ONYEKA NUBIA
England’s Other Countrymen: Black Tudor Society was first published in 2019
by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK.
www.zedbooks.net
Copyright © Onyeka Nubia 2019
The rights of Onyeka Nubia to be identified as the author of this work have
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988.
Typeset in Bulmer by Swales and Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon
Index by John Barker
Cover design by David A. Gee
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of
Zed Books Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78699-420-2 hb
ISBN 978-1-78699-421-9 pb
ISBN 978-1-78699-422-6 epdf
ISBN 978-1-78699-423-3 epub
ISBN 978-1-78699-424-0 mobi
Contents
about the author vi
preface vii
note on the text x
Introduction 1
one Imagining Tudor England 9
two ‘little England’ 30
three The Pathology of the Curse of Ham 55
four Painting the Blackamoore Black 93
five B lack Strangers and Slaves Turn’d African
Neighbours 131
Conclusion 165
appendix 1 178
appendix 2 190
notes 194
selected bibliography 283
index 345
About the Author
Onyeka Nubia is a pioneering and internationally renowned histo-
rian, writer and presenter committed to the study of comparative
histories and intersectionalism. Nubia has been a keynote pre-
senter at numerous venues including the Houses of Parliament
and the National Portrait Gallery, and has been a consultant
and presenter for television programmes including BBC Two’s
History Cold Case and Channel 4’s London’s Lost Graveyard. He
is the writer of Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England (2013)
and Young Othello (2015).
Preface
‘We know what we are …’1 ’cause we know, what we were?
Books are a writer’s children – but they need to be read to
grow into adults. ‘Ay, there’s the rub,’2 because apathy and
entrenched political positioning can affect whether and what
we read. There is legitimate unease that indifference may be
buoyed by the hue and cry of the chat room, and that the one
that shouts the loudest and last may blind the eye of reason and
drum out the senses. Bloggers have become the new prophets,
and social media the new Gods: jealous Gods – that demand
obsessive obeisance. Writing a book means taking a stance
against the immediacy of the punch line delivered with a shout:
tell your audience what they want to hear, how they want to hear
it! Authors ask readers to contemplate complicated answers to
difficult questions.
As a writer, one’s own integrity cannot be compromised by
conforming to normatives, simply because they are popular.
That would be the equivalent to Nicolaus Copernicus advocat-
ing geocentrism3 because the church and his friends told him to.
In modern times, historical normatives are often underpinned
by concepts of modernism. This is an idea that ‘things’ are
getting better. Ancillary to this is a conceit that the past is some-
what strange, and the source for most of our ills such as racism
and xenophobia. We are told that somewhere, at sometime in
viii preface
history, racist attitudes began, and that is why people have them
now. In other words, our prejudices are a legacy of history.
Early modern England: the Tudor and early Stuart periods are
blamed for being the incubators of modern racism. It is a truism,
that European and European-American thinkers from the eight-
eenth to the twentieth century such as: Arthur de Gobineau,
Madison Grant, Karl Richard Lepsius, Samuel George Morton
and Charles Gabriel Seligman used anthropology, eugenics,
history and theology to validate their claims that Africans were
inferior.4 These writers imagined history. The early modern
period was central in that imagination, because it contained
the Renaissance: a ‘look back’ to Europe’s classical antiquity.
This flourished between the fourteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies and resulted in a ‘rebirth’ of European creativity. Many
European and European-American commentators claimed this
metempsychosis or reincarnation was an exclusive European
soiree.5 This book challenges that notion: Africans helped shape
European social ethnology and societies. In claiming this, the
social history of Africans that lived in Tudor and early Stuart
England is revealed. Indeed, this research has been the focus of
a twenty-five year sojourn.
By contesting the automatic othering of Africans in the early
modern period, a stand is made against long-held narratives on
early modern societies contained in post-colonial theories. These
conventions have created a mis-memory that Africans had no
place in history as protagonists. And that during the early mod-
ern period African enslavement defined their impotence and
objectification, and is the only major reference point required for
any historical investigation. The inference is that the systematic
enslavement of African people practised during Georgian and
Victorian times can be back-dated to the early modern period,
and that there is an unbroken line of English domination of these
activities that started with John Hawkins in 1567 and ended in