Human ornaments
Records show that black men and women have lived in Britain in small numbers since at least the 12th century, but it was the empire that caused their numbers to swell exponentially in the 17th and 18th centuries.
As the British empire expanded, African and Afro-Caribbean slaves were ferried across the seas to work on plantations in the Caribbean or the Americas, where they had to do back-breaking labour all their lives under the scalding sun.
'Not for nothing did a coin - the guinea - derive its etymology from the West African region of that name'
Others, in much smaller numbers, were ferried into the ports of London, Liverpool and Bristol - on the same ships that brought imperial products such as tea, sugar, cotton, coffee, rum, fruit, wine, tobacco and oil to enrich the national economy.
Not for nothing did a coin - the guinea - derive its etymology from the West African region of that name, the area from which hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were seized against their will. For traders of 17th- and 18th-century Britain, the African was literally a unit of currency.
Those who came to Britain were often brought in by planters, government officials, and military and naval officers returning to the United Kingdom. Slaves were seen as reassuring companions, who might staunch some of the loneliness felt by the white expatriates on their long voyages back to an island they had not seen for decades.
Other black people were offered to the commanders of slaving vessels as gifts, and were later sold into domestic service at quayside auctions or at coffee-houses in London, where they were given names such as John Limehouse or Tom Camden.
Slavery was legal in Britain until 1772, and many of these Africans found themselves working as butlers or other household attendants in aristocratic families. Their duties were not necessarily onerous; their chief function often seems to have been just to look decorative. They served as human equivalents of the porcelain, textiles, wallpapers and lacquered pieces that the English nobility was increasingly buying from the east.
These enslaved people were often dressed in fancy garb, their heads wrapped in bright turbans. Owners selected them on the basis of their looks and the lustre of their young skin, much as dog fanciers today might coo and trill over a cute poodle.
Published: 2003-09-29
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