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The presence and history of black people in Britain, going back centuries, has been obscured, forgotten and misunderstood. This book, which expands upon the Radio 4 series of the same name, uses new archival discoveries and fresh scholarly interpretations to recover the stories of some of the black individuals, groups and communities whose lives in England were shaped and restricted by slavery and racism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In eighteen chapters by different contributors, readers encounter black figures from the past who span the social and economic spectrum from domestic servants, actors, and mariners to those who enjoyed wealth, privilege and, in rare cases, power. In addition to investigating how black people of this era navigated the complex dynamics of white households and larger white British society, connections—economic and personal—to colonial slavery and the slave trade in America and the Caribbean are threaded throughout the book. In addition to scholarly work, many chapters examine how the lives of some of these black figures are being newly explored and interpreted in non-academic mediums such as television, film, fiction, art, and performance. Current events—including the Grenfell Towers fire and the Windrush immigration scandal—underscore the importance of recognizing Britain’s multiracial past and this book urges continued study of a historical black presence to better understand the past and affirm an expanded notion of Britishness.

In 1804, Haiti declared its independence from France to become the world’s first ‘black’ nation state. Throughout the nineteenth century, Haiti maintained its independence, consolidating and expanding its national and, at times, imperial projects. In doing so, Haiti joined a host of other nation states and empires that were emerging and expanding across the Atlantic World. The largest and, in many ways, most powerful of these empires was that of Britain. Haiti in the British Imagination is the first book to focus on the diplomatic relations and cultural interactions between Haiti and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. As well as a story of British imperial aggression and Haitian ‘resistance’, it is also one of a more complicated set of relations: of rivalry, cultural exchange and intellectual dialogue. At particular moments in the Victorian period, ideas about Haiti had wide-reaching relevancies for British anxieties over the quality of British imperial administration, over what should be the relations between ‘the British’ and people of African descent, and defining the limits of black sovereignty. Haitians were key in formulating, disseminating and correcting ideas about Haiti. Through acts of dialogue, Britons and Haitians impacted on the worldviews of one another, and with that changed the political and cultural landscapes of the Atlantic World.

Enriching the metropole-colony frame that has tended to dominate studies of European colonial empire, this book assumes a transnational approach to modern Italy and establishes how Italy’s national project and history of nationalism was intimately bound up with the fantasy—and then reality during the fascist period—of an empire in the Mediterranean. Although largely forgotten in both Italy and Greece, Italian imperial rule in the Dodecanese islands tells the story of the making of modern Europe at its margins. Unlike other studies of Italian colonialism, that emphasize Mussolini’s creation of a new ‘Roman’ empire, Italy’s Sea demonstrates that ambitions for colonization in the Mediterranean extend back to the Liberal unification of Italy. By retracing how ideas of the local, the regional and the global were united with the idea of the ‘national’ in Italy, the book offers of new perspective of postcolonial critique of both Italy and Europe, and sheds light on contemporary ideas of race, nation and belonging today.

Losing the Thread is the first full-length study of the effect of the American Civil War on Britain’s raw cotton trade and on the Liverpool cotton market. It details the worst crisis in the British cotton trade in the 19th century. Before the civil war, America supplied 80 per cent of Britain’s cotton. In August 1861, this fell to almost zero, where it remained for four years. Despite increased supplies from elsewhere, Britain’s largest industry received only 36 per cent of the raw material it needed from 1862 to 1864. This book establishes the facts of Britain’s raw cotton supply during the war: how much there was of it, in absolute terms and in relation to the demand, where it came from and why, how much it cost, and what effect the reduced supply had on Britain’s cotton manufacture. It includes an enquiry into the causes of the Lancashire cotton famine, which contradicts the historical consensus on the subject. Examining the impact of the civil war on Liverpool and its cotton market, the book disputes the historic portrayal of Liverpool as a solidly pro-Confederate town. It also demonstrates how reckless speculation infested and distorted the raw cotton market, and lays bare the shadowy world of the Liverpool cotton brokers, who profited hugely from the war while the rest of Lancashire starved.

The Atlantic Ocean not only connected North and South America with Europe through trade but also provided the means for an exchange of knowledge and ideas, including political radicalism. Socialists and anarchists would use this “radical ocean” to escape state prosecution in their home countries and establish radical milieus abroad. However, this was often a rather unorganized development and therefore the connections that existed were quite diverse. The movement of individuals led to the establishment of organizational ties and the import and exchange of political publications between Europe and the Americas. The main aim of this book is to show how the transatlantic networks of political radicalism evolved with regard to socialist and anarchist milieus and in particular to look at the actors within the relevant processes—topics that have so far been neglected in the major histories of transnational political radicalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Individual case studies are examined within a wider context to show how networks were actually created, how they functioned and their impact on the broader history of the radical Atlantic.

In most studies of British decolonisation, the world of labour is neglected, the key roles being allocated to metropolitan statesmen and native elites. Instead this volume focuses on the role played by working people, their experiences, initiatives and organisations, in the dissolution of the British Empire, both in the metropole and in the colonies. How central was the intervention of the metropolitan Left in the liquidation of the British Empire? Were labour mobilisations in the colonies only stepping stones for bourgeois nationalists? To what extent were British labour activists willing and able to form connections with colonial workers, and vice versa? Here are some of the complex questions on which this volume sheds new light. Though convergences were fragile and temporary, this book recapture the sense of uncertainty that accompanied the final decades of the British Empire, a period when radical minorities hoped that coordinated efforts across borders might lead not only to the destruction of the British Empire but to that of capitalism and imperialism in general. Exploiting rare primary sources and adopting a resolutely transnational approach, our collection makes an original contribution to both labour history and imperial studies.