Black Tudors
The Untold Story
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A new, transformative history – in Tudor times there were Black people living and working in Britain, and they were free
‘This is history on the cutting edge of archival research, but accessibly written and alive with human details and warmth.’ David Olusoga, author of Black and British: A Forgotten History
A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England…
They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history.
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Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018
A Book of the Year for the Evening Standard and the Observer
‘That rare thing: a book about the 16th century that said something new.’ Evening Standard, Books of the Year
‘Splendid… a cracking contribution to the field.’ Dan Jones, Sunday Times
‘Consistently fascinating, historically invaluable… the narrative is pacy... Anyone reading it will never look at Tudor England in the same light again.’ Daily Mail
Customer Reviews
Refreshing narrative and intimate insight
Fascinating insight into the remarkable, and less glamorous, lives of Black people in Tudor England. I enjoyed learning about the unique skills and crafts of many of these individuals, as well as the accompanying context about industries such as the textile and ordnance trades of the 16th and 17th centuries. My secondary school history curriculum covered the Tudors on 3 separate occasions; how differently I would have understood our country’s history had some of this knowledge been included. While I was attracted to this book as an alternative narrative on Black history to the oversaturated subject of slavery, I did appreciate the balanced representation of England’s role in slavery - I did not know slavery was never legal in England, but the book did not let us off the hook and made clear connections to the English dealings in the Transatlantic slave trade. I dropped one star simply because some chapters seemed to focus mostly on the backstory (and often, the drama) of the white people rather than the Black individual for whom the chapter was supposed to be about, and in some cases we barely learnt anything about them. But overall an enjoyable read whose piecemeal structure made it an accessible read.