This post is part of Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium, organised and edited by Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell. The blog series is introduced here. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Amber Burbidge

Amber Burbidge is a PhD researcher in the department of History at the European University Institute, Florence, whose research reassesses representations of race and gender in early modern material culture in European geographies, such as France and Britain, between 1650 -1800. Her research develops from the Early Modern History MA she completed at the University of York which looked at the Black female presence in portraiture, prints, and porcelain ‘blackamoor’ ornaments. She also works as a co-convenor for the Visual and Material Culture working group, as well as volunteering as an administrator for the Decolonising Initiative.

Habib’s Black Lives is monumental in its thorough rereading of archival material and its early establishment of the Black British presence. The monograph takes the form of both a methodological guide, leading readers through an incremental progression of archival findings, as well as providing a database-like appendix which holds 448 itemised ‘black citations’. Its methodologies and content have therefore been used by historians such as Kaufmann, Olusoga, Spicer and Chater, with its vast database proving to be a great inspiration for contemporary historians of the field. This post will critically assess and reflect on Habib’s work for historians who are thinking through gender studies and intersectional frameworks, considering how Black Lives is still relevant in contemporary historical gender studies.

Black history has been critiqued by Black feminist historians, such as Hooks, Hull, Bell-Scott and Smith, for its ignorance towards Black women. This is not completely the case with Habib, as his research is inclusive of a female presence. The issue, nevertheless, is that he writes with limited engagement on gender and with little recognition of the differences that women faced. In his first chapter he includes just one sentence on the issue mentioning that “of the 16 individuals of color named, three are women and 13 are men”, highlighting the gender imbalance, but without questioning why, or what this could mean for Black women. In his second chapter, where gender is addressed, it is still inadequate considering the level of research completed. He recognises that “black women themselves remain muted in a history that cannot speak”, however, he finishes his participation in the subject here, falling short of meaningful questioning or comprehensive intersectional research on the gendered experiences of British Black women. Furthermore, where he analyses numerical data, gender appears to be an afterthought, rather than a genuine academic question, as in comparison to his other data assessments gender takes up little space within the discussions. He questions if “the dearth of black women might be the reflection of an English preference for labor-capable black males”, yet again seems to leave this question floating without addressing the issue further.

This is not just an issue with Habib’s work but a general criticism of the historiography: scholars often fail to acknowledge Black women due to the dual discrimination of their gender and race. Therefore, scholars such as Crenshaw and Hobson have called for new intersectional studies, with Scott emphasising the fact that if “scholars commit to understanding class, race and gender” together, they will get a better understanding of the true “inequalities of power”.

This is where the work of Hartman and Fuentes create a bridge between modern intersectional approaches and Habib’s foundational research. Habib explains that “what is little looked for, and what is therefore non-existent, is also what is/should be unknown because it cannot be known”, encouraging the embracement of the uncertainty in turning unclear sources into numerical data. This methodology can be seen through Black, queer, and gender studies where Hartman’s methodologies of critical fabulation, close narration, or speculative history, allow one to “compose alternative narratives of black existence” by “engaging with extant archival materials critically and creatively”. With her aim to trace the afterlife of slavery in modern America and rescue narratives of those “sparsely documented” and “systematically excluded” she completed her research using a methodology which is “untethered or indifferent to the rules of the historical guild” as it, “lingers in the space [… of] the something else and the what-might-be”, allowing for new considerations of Black lives, which is both inclusive of gender and sexuality. Fuentes, looking at violence and enslaved women in archives, also emphasises the need to read “along the bias grain” to understand “the context of archives that are partial, incomplete, and structured by privileges of class, race, and gender” and are therefore “systematically distorted”. The two share similarities in their attitude towards the limitations of the archives, however, Fuentes, with an aspiration of archival integrity, looks at developing broader contextualisation in order to stretch the (often) small details available.

Hartman’s and Fuentes’ methodologies share similarities with Habib’s, which, by allowing for broader consideration of Blackness, ensures that there is not an ignorance towards the possibilities of a Black presence or an initial assumption of Whiteness. Furthermore, by making postulations based on people and contexts of surrounding communities, he applies a methodology which correlates with Hartman’s fabulation, or Fuentes’ uses of space, structures, and architecture, in order to understand what their life may have been, beyond their fragmented or brief mention in the archives (often simply the mention of a birth or baptism). Therefore, it is clear that Habib’s research and methodological approach is useful for contemporary historians working on gender and race, especially with his focus on reading into the unknown or the uncertain. By using this methodology, in addition to Hartman’s and Fuentes’ intersectional considerations, scholars can move beyond the limitations and bias of archival sources to reach new understandings of Black experiences and presence in Britain.

To conclude, I do not wish to negate the immense amount of work and archival research Habib has contributed as Black Lives is truly a foundational work. Critical engagement is required considering his limited focus on gender, however, if the historiography wishes to understand Black presence and experiences in the early modern period with an intersectional understanding, his work cannot be ignored. Habib uncovered the existence of over 40 assumed Black women in the period of 1500-1677 leaving these sources open to new analysis and explorations. His methodology allows for possibility and openness which can enable further understandings of the potentials of Black existence and experiences in the archives. As more historians move to consider race and a Black presence in their research, there is hope that new intersectional approaches can make use of the foundational framework that Habib has offered in his innovative Black Lives.

Click here to see all the posts in this series.

This post is part of Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium, organised and edited by Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell. The blog series is introduced here. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Hannah Crawforth

Hannah Crawforth is a Reader in Early Modern Literature in the English Department at King’s College London. She has published extensively on poetry both modern and early modern.

Black Lives in the English Archives seeks to make visible those whose presence in early modern England has been overlooked. It does so using a methodology that Imtiaz Habib also believes has been overlooked as a result of what he calls “the triumph of theory in a poststructuralist age”.^[1]  His painstaking excavation of “obscure, truncated and largely inaccessible documentary records” and magisterial synthesis of these archival findings into a compelling narrative, is an incontrovertible argument for the importance of the archive, as well as a field-changing account of the Black lives we encounter there.^[2] “Scattered across the four quadrants of London” and beyond, drawn from fragments of “legal, taxation, medical and civic archives is the varied impress of black working lives,” Habib writes in his introduction. The stories that emerge from the archive are the hard facts that counteract the lingering falsehood that “there were no actual people of color in early modern England; references to them in popular media of the time are metaphoric; and the period is race-innocent.”^[3] But I call them stories because I am interested here in the ways in which Habib draws upon his extensive archival research to narrativize the lives of the Black working classes that his work uncovers. Habib’s book is powerful not just in the extraordinary body of evidence he amasses, but also in the way he marshals these archival discoveries, carefully assembling the fragments into narratives that leap off the page, bringing the lives they recount to life.

It is this idea of reanimating the archive, and the Black lives Habib locates within it, that inspires the work of the poet Caroline Randall Williams, which I have been teaching and writing about. Williams’ Lucy Negro, Redux, published in 2019 with the subtitle: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet, tells the story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets from the point of view of a figure from the archives who has been called “Lucy Negro”, and whom some have seen as a possible model for the so-called “Dark Lady” to whom the later part of the sequence seems to be addressed. “In August of 2012, I got it into my head that Shakespeare had a black lover,” Williams writes, “and that this woman was the subject of sonnets 127 to 154.”^[4] Lucy Negro, Redux intersperses Williams’ poems about Lucy with a prose account telling the story of her meeting with English professor Duncan Salkeld and, consequently, with the figure of “Black Luce” in the archives of Bridewell prison. Interweaving archival narrative with original poems Williams recovers and reclaims an overlooked Black life from the English archive in ways that resonate with Habib’s own critical and creative project.^[5]

From Volume IV of the Bridewell Prison Records.

London.1579-1597.

This exiat sayeth that
William Shaxberd sent into this house by virtue
aforesaid saieth that he was at Gilbert Eastes
house in Turnmill street a grete while and had
there much wyne and good cheese and had
thuse of a blackamoore bawde Easte kepte
there also called Rose
This exiat sayeth that
Black Luce alias Lucy Negro is by one richard
Burbage accused of taking monies for divers services
then not rendered to which the accused
Negro taketh much exception and saieth
further that burbage and numerous other
confederates of The Theatre playhouse without
Shorditch have been manye times in her
companye without paying

[…]                                                       (26)

Williams’ skilful use of line breaks makes poetry of the archive: “thuse”, emphasised by its position at the start of the line, and echo of the preceding line’s opening “there”, is a stark reminder of the facts of rape (as we can only call the account of prostitution without payment or consent that we find in this poem). Likewise, the momentary pause after “in her”, before “companye” follows on the next line, makes plain the facts of what is being described here, facts that have for so long lain overlooked in the archive.

Before she came to life in the pages of Williams’ poetry collection (and the accompanying ballet devised and performed by the Nashville Ballet), Lucy had already danced fleetingly through the pages of Imtiaz Habib’s book. In a disturbing passage describing prostitution as “one of three destinies of English black people at that time” (according to Peter Fryer), and noting the pernicious myth that sex with a Black woman could cure venereal disease (a pretext for untold sexual exploitation and abuse), Habib cites a letter “from Dennis Edwards to Thomas Lankford, the Earl of Hartford’s secretary, on 28 May 1599, asking him to ‘Pray enquire and secure my negress; she is certainly at the Swan, at the Dane’s beershop, Turnbull Street, Clerkenwell (Item 235).” Habib continues, “If the ‘negress’ is not the infamous prostitute Lucy Negro that I have elsewhere proposed she is, she is certainly one of her colleagues, and Dennis Edwards’s propriety addressing of her illuminates the sexual bondage into which she is cast.”^[6]

Williams’ poems work in exactly this space, illuminating Lucy’s suffering at the hands of her abusers (Shakespeare amongst them) that is clearly present in the archival record, but which is overlooked because that record has been assembled by those who are complicit in her exploitation. Habib continues: “Her sexual exploitation as a prostitute is the most vicious form of the performance of a negative pathology for black people, particularly young black women, in which the only use that destitute enslaved black females can have is as casual sexual conveniences for the male public at large.” As Habib goes onto suggest, “Muted by her linguistic and cultural alienation, and incarcerated within economic and physical bonds, her compliance in her use as a sexual consumable is the ultimate cancellation of her black humanity and her final exclusion from the normative life of the English socius.”^[7] It is telling that one of the index entries under “Black women” in Habib’s book reads simply: “see also, sexual exploitation”.

But if Habib uncovers Lucy’s story, Williams gives her a voice, confronting directly the way she has been “Muted” by the fragmentation of the archive and, even more, a literary critical tradition unwilling to look at what that archive holds and to be held to account for its overlooking. Lucy Negro, Redux, ends with a powerful affirmation, told in the first-person voice, of all that she is, of her Black life in the archive:

Lucy’s Exiat Sayeth That

This exiat sayeth that
I am wild, and that I live by it, and that I like it; like the money, and the
witness, and the grotesque, and the yes, yes.
This exiat sayeth that
I am not a partridge, or a ruby. I am a potato, a beetroot. Not a precious
bird, or jewel, but a dirt-dug tube. Rustle me, rub me all over, and I will
muddle your interiors with flecks of brown earth. You will sigh at your
soiled hands and then you will put them in your pockets to pay for it.
This exiat sayeth that
You will come again to scour my body with your worthy, emollient palm
creases because I am that round, strange, colored victual, and further,
this examinate sayeth that you will dirt grit your nails to gather me up
and by God we will both be sustained. By God if you warm and eat me,
I will nourish and fatten you.

Click here to see all the posts in this series.

[1] Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008; repr. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 9. Citations refer to the Routledge edition.

[2] Habib, Black Lives, 1.

[3] Habib, Black Lives, 3.

[4] Caroline Randall Williams, Lucy Negro, Redux: The Bard, A Book, and A Ballet (Nashville, TN: Third Man Books, 2019), 8.

[5] Williams’ method might be compared to that of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Age of Phillis (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2020), a retelling of the life of Phillis Wheatley, which similarly draws upon extensive archival research.

[6] Habib, Black Lives, 107. Habib here references arguments identifying this figure with “Lucy Negro” which he first makes in Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 13, 15, 30, 78.

[7] Habib, Black Lives, 107.

This post is part of Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium, organised and edited by Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell. The blog series is introduced here. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Annabelle Gilmore

Annabelle Gilmore is a third year PhD student at the University of Birmingham, funded by AHRC Midlands4Cities, in collaboration with the National Trust. Her thesis explores how Asian imperialism and slavery in Jamaica can be traced through art objects collected and displayed at the country house, Charlecote Park in Warwickshire. She continues to work on exploring Black British history in eighteenth-century Warwickshire.

Habib’s succinct methodology in tracing Black lives in the English archives for the sixteenth and seventeenth century is a framework that still holds strong today. His model of painstakingly viewing the parochial archives is something I feel nearly all historians working in this field have had to contend with. What Habib points out is that the very nature of these records can be considered “a key of identity, whereby the nature and history of each kind of record is a clue to the social knowledge and hence communal imprint of the black individual cited by it.” This drives home the point that when searching for the lives of Black people in Britain, it is necessary to read the silences left by the modicum of information harvested from the archives.

Habib’s work has been insightful for my own efforts in trying to illuminate Black lives in Warwickshire in the long eighteenth century. This has its own challenges, as Habib points out in his chapter on Black people outside London. It is a simple fact that the numbers are just not as plentiful outside London, for Habib’s dates as well as my own. But it is certain that they matter just as much. While Habib uses the provincial records to “offer important confirmations as well as modifications of the black history of the London citation”, I believe this still anchors the provinces to London as the centre for the Black experience. It is true that it is all connected. London’s socio-political influence did spread across the country but centring it risks missing the specificity of provincial records.

Nevertheless, Habib’s work is extremely insightful for tracing London’s economic influences through the eighteenth century. He notes that one of the tracks for Black people to be found in the provinces was through merchant traders, who were often gentry and aristocrats who made “astronomical profits” from trading and slaving in Africa. Habib states this directly led to rapid cash profits and subsequently investments in English provincial land. Ultimately, these lands were transformed into conspicuous estates, seen in the “great burst of country house construction” that occurred between 1575 and 1625, and captive Black people could be found on these estates as a symbol of their owner’s wealth.  The eighteenth-century country house is often adorned with paintings depicting a member of the gentry or aristocracy with a Black servant. Black people identified in Warwickshire in the eighteenth century are connected to country estates or found in nearby locations. Habib’s work shows that this phenomenon began as early as the Elizabethan era and it highlights the intrinsic relationship between the countryside, wealth, and Black people inhabiting the provinces in the early modern era. Habib’s work is useful in showing how this pathway of wealth through the forced migration of Africans, transitioned to Atlantic slavery. From Africa to the Caribbean, then from the Caribbean to Britain, Black people were moved without their consent. They would remain as status symbols for white people living in country houses.

This raises another issue that Habib mentions: that it is a common feature outside of London for citations of Black people to be mentioned only in relation to the white enslaver, rather than some of the London-based individuals where there is more information about them as a person. This has been a problem that I have faced with Warwickshire’s Black people in the eighteenth century. The mentions in parochial records are minimal, sometimes just a name and their status as Black. Those with further descriptors are related to who has enslaved them. Whilst Habib’s records give a story, albeit anchored to a white individual, the records for Warwickshire are less detailed. The frustration I have experienced around this was compounded when reading Habib’s chapter on Black people outside London, and discovering that so much is dedicated to the south of England. It is understandable, and his records on Anthony and James Chappell in Northamptonshire exemplify what Habib terms the “vaporous” lives of the figures in the Warwickshire archive. In my experience, I have been left with a few names, a painting, and an offhand, unsourced sentence in the biography of a gentry family. I am aware that these few people across the eighteenth century do not constitute a community like that found in London or the south of England, but each of their stories, like Anthony and James Chappell, have been denied and diminished by traditional histories.

In many ways, this highlights the progression in historiography since Habib’s work was originally published in 2008. Recently, Simon Newman’s book Freedom Seekers followed a similar method to Habib in documenting enslaved people liberating themselves in Restoration London. However, Newman’s approach borrowed from a growing methodology developed by Black Feminist scholars such as Marisa Fuentes and Saidiya Hartman, and employs a creative element to reconstruct the lives of the freedom seekers found in newspapers and diary entries. This is in an effort to recognise the apocryphal information that Habib discusses but also breaks the mould of traditional history that Habib describes in his chapter on lives outside London. This combats the issue of a sole focus on the white enslaver by redirecting analysis onto Black individuals.

Anyone taking this approach would need to accept many of the unconfirmed aspects of Black lives in the archives. Within my own work with the Warwickshire archive, this would open up possible analysis, extending it beyond the spare parish records. Particularly, in broadening the scope of British history to include the Caribbean, intricate connections can be explored and expressed within the lives of these Black individuals in Warwick. Whilst Habib was wary of this in his own work, I believe that analysing the “vaporous” facets of the archive and using imaginative exploration grounded in known historical understanding will develop a rich history from these Black lives to fill the silences left behind.

Click here to see all the posts in this series.

This post is part of Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium, organised and edited by Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell. The blog series is introduced here. You can join Rebecca and Jamie to celebrate the publication of the posts at a free event at the London Metropolitan Archives on Friday 19 May – the event includes presentations by the post authors and a tour of the LMA’s new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Nikki Clarke

Nikki Clarke is a final year PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on how people gathered and assessed news in the multimedia world of seventeenth-century England. You can find her on Twitter at @nikkiclarke1.

He delivered a prince that the French had taken in the country, who by two Jesuit priests was put to torment by a suite of apparel whose linings were full of prickes. The Jesuits in the coming home were put to tast of the same sauce. The prince was diverse days together, in the beginning of Michaelmas terme, at the Royall Exchange to be seene.^[1]

With this diary entry in November 1628, the Reverend John Rous alerts us to the fact that news of the travels of Amantacha, the son of Soranhes, a Wendat leader who traded with French near Quebec in the 1620s and 1630s, had arrived in the quiet, rural parish of Santon Downham, in Suffolk.  My usual research is on multimedia news and accuracy in the seventeenth-century, and this blog tries to explore the way both English and French sources use the story of Amantacha to reinforce their own religious and political conflict on both sides of the Atlantic. Continue reading →

This post is part of Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium, organised and edited by Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell. The blog series is introduced here. You can join Rebecca and Jamie to celebrate the publication of the posts at a free event at the London Metropolitan Archives on Friday 19 May – the event includes presentations by the post authors and a tour of the LMA’s new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Graham Moore

Graham is a PhD student on a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme between the University of Reading and The National Archives. His current research focuses on piracy and maritime communities in the early seventeenth-century, through the lens of the records of the High Court of Admiralty. He is also working as part of an ongoing project with the Berkshire Record Office and the University of Reading to uncover diverse histories in Berkshire’s archives. You can read Graham’s recent publication, the open-access article ‘The Liues, Apprehensions, Arraignments, and Executions of the 19 Late Pyrates: Jacobean Piracy in Law and Literature’ (2022), in MDPI’s Humanities journal.

The majority of work on the history of diverse presences in Britain have focused on major urban and economic centres such as London. Away from the metropole, the story of ‘imperceptible’ Black presence (and the presence of those from other cultural and ethnic groups that are, contextually, in minority) often remains untold.^[1] Yet the evidence is there. If only one knows where and how to look, we do indeed find that “Black history is everywhere”.^[2]

This blog post will explore an ongoing project with the Berkshire Record Office (BRO) to uncover histories of rural diversity. It will suggest that whilst such a survey is fruitful and worthwhile, a methodology that actively recognises the unique problems posed by its respective ‘archival silences’ is required to overcome the imperceptibility identified by trailblazing scholars like Imtiaz Habib.^[3] Continue reading →