Rosanna, baptism, “a blackamoore woman of Sir Robert Davers aged about 16 years,” Rougham, (Suffolk), (1688)
With Africans in East Anglia, 1467–1833, Richard C. Maguire has written an excellent book that develops historians’ understanding of English/British history. Maguire explores the presence, status, and origins of Africans in early modern East Anglia between 1467 and 1833. He systematically debunks any notion that this period and region were mono-ethnically white. But Maguire does so much more: he reveals the limitations of a perspective that diminishes the study of diversity to large British metropolitan port cities such as: Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and London. Unfortunately, this is the trajectory followed by many pioneering books on Black British history such as Kenneth Little's Negroes in Britain: A Study of Racial Relations in English Society (1948), Nigel File and Chris Power's Black Settlers in Britain 1555–1958 (1981), and the Greater London Council's A History of the Black Presence in London (1986).
Maguire offers a different perspective, one that focuses on diversity in East Anglia's historic port towns such as Ipswich, Great Yarmouth, and King's Lynn. These are towns with historic links to the Atlantic Ocean, the Iberian Peninsula, and beyond. Maguire shows how the sea connects East Anglia to the rest of the world. Rosanna, above, traveled along these routes to reach England. Sir Robert Davers may have held her in servitude, as he was a powerful slave owner in Barbados. Nevertheless, Rosanna's presence in Suffolk should not be dismissed as only being a collateral consequence of the slave trade. Rosanna is part of the local history of Rougham, as much as she is also connected to wider African studies.
Rosanna is linked to local history and African Diaspora studies, both of which are neglected fields of study. Maguire brings these histories together. And as he explains, this process is like that of an archaeologist constructing a Roman villa using only a “few tiles” (6). There are manifold difficulties in utilizing African history in this way, largely because African history is too often obfuscated by a methodology of reductionism. In practice, this methodology can result in historians’ explaining away an African presence as being temporary, transient, an anomaly, or even incongruous. The work of scholars such as Maguire is central in dispelling these assumptions, as they use local history as a key to unlock the narratives of people too frequently forgotten by English history.
Maguire is at his best when contextualizing and recontextualizing these Africans using local history. He does this to reveal the narrative of a mercurial African named Eylys in William Pigott's testimony of 1524–25. And Maguire's intellectual sketch of “Thomas Haryson alias Blackamore” is fantastic: through Maguire's words the reader can vividly picture Haryson living in the village of Kessingland (Suffolk) in 1560 (6). Other poignant biographies include the Snoring family in Norfolk 1638 (31). The way that their ethnic visibility appears and disappears is congruent with other Africans living in English villages where a racialized hegemony had not yet become entrenched (22–43).
However, Maguire does more than provide historical biographies. He proposes patterns and trends to explain early modern ethnography. For example, he gives an excellent explanation of the eighteenth-century term “man of colour” (42), though his exploration of the effect of Christianity on ethnographic terms may need a little more exposition (40). Nevertheless, Maguire is right to observe that the term Negro became dominate in English nomenclature only in the seventeenth century, probably through contact with Spain. Then again, the term Negro derives from the root word Niger, and this latter word, as Maguire acknowledges, was used in earlier times to describe Africans. So, there is a question of whether, or how, the use of the older word Niger influenced the adoption of the later epithet Negro. In a similar way, Maguire's further discussions on terms such as the word Moor may have been more effectively framed through using definitions from primary sources (45–48). It is all too easy to adopt later ethnographic idioms and overlay these orientalized notions on an earlier period.
Of course, the matters discussed above are inherent in examining the presence, status, and origins of Africans during a four-hundred-year period. The task of writing about such a population is complicated by the facts. The methodologies one uses to make sense of an African presence at the beginning of the early modern period are not those one would use for a later period. England in 1467 was a small country outside the nexus of Spanish and Portuguese power and was in the midst of a series of civil conflicts. However, Britain in 1833 was altogether another country. It was the seat of the largest empire in the world. How one discusses these large regional and global changes and their possible impact on Africans living in East Anglia is difficult. With hindsight, it may have been better to write two separate books dividing the period in half and not seeking to establish consistent narratives across the four hundred years.
This book's potency comes from being part of a growing literature on Africans in early modern England. Publishers should not encourage authors to write or create the definitive book, essay, podcast, or documentary on Black British history. The Black in Britain is not a political soundbite, or a single month of a twelve-month year. In consequence, authors should be cautious in following the trajectory of Peter Fryer's Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). This book was popularized as the first, and definitive, book on Africans in Britain. It is not that, but it does remain an important historical resource that adds to the accumulated knowledge of a neglected field of historiography. And in a similar way, Maguire's Africans in East Anglia, 1467–1833 greatly enhances understanding of regional ethnography and corroborates this African presence as part of Britain's early modern history.
