African and Caribbean People in Britain A History

by Adi, Hakim

• ISBN13: 9781802060683
• ISBN10: 1802060685
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-12-01
• Publisher: Penguin

Summary

Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest. Yet, as acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain's heart. Libyan legionaries patrolled Hadrian's Wall while Rome's first 'African Emperor' died in York. In Elizabethan England, 'Black Tudors' served in the land's most eminent households while intrepid African explorers helped Sir Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe. And, as Britain became a major colonial and commercial power, it was African and Caribbean people who led the radical struggle for freedom - a struggle which raged throughout the twentieth century and continues today in Black Lives Matter campaigns.

Author Biography

Hakim Adi is Professor of the History of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Chichester. The first historian of African heritage to become a professor of history in Britain, he has been researching and writing about the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain for decades. He is the founder and consultant historian of the Young Historians Project.