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.

Jyotsna G. Singh

Jyotsna G. Singh is Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

Special thanks to Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell for generating “the multi-event symposium, bringing together scholars working at the forefront of early modern Black history and premodern race studies” to discuss the vital importance and continuing legacy of Imitiaz Habib’s path-breaking text. These non-competitive and generative scholarly conversations of the symposium (blogs) will, I hope, serve as a model for future exchanges committed to activism and social change.

Personal Reminiscences

Imtiaz Habib and I were regular SAA (Shakespeare Association of America) friends for many years, from the late 1990s onwards, till his untimely death in 2018. At every meeting we caught up with long chats, which in his native Bengali, one would call Adda – a popular term for “hangout,” or extended conversations among small groups, often verging into cerebral arguments, yet also producing a unique conviviality. We would often discuss the history of the Sub-continent, from the colonial period through the violent partitions and their lingering effects. Imtiaz’s memories stretched a generation before mine and he vividly recalled the birth of Bangladesh in violence, the assassination of Sheikh Mujib-Ur-Rehman and continuing national divisions. Thinking of him today, in that Adda modality, I imagine his happy bemusement and slight disbelief at the belated attention his book is currently receiving. He would be vigorously engaging with each blog post in the Symposium in his honor, approving, challenging, or even interrogating the different perspectives. We would all be enriched by his brilliance and critical rigor, but above all, by his intellectual generosity. 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. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Rebecca Adusei

Rebecca Adusei is a PhD student at King’s College, London. Her project locates and analyses depictions and characterisations of Sub-Saharan Africans in Early Modern literature and drama. Trained in Literary Studies, Rebecca’s research has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Drawing together Literary Studies and History, she looks at Black individuals in the early modern archives and scrutinises their characterisations in literature. Rebecca runs a book blog on Instagram where she sometimes discusses the Early Modern period. She has previously conducted tours for KCL’s Visible Skin Project. She has spoken at the London Shakespeare Centre and the Shakespeare’s Globe’s Home and Early Modernity Conference. In 2021/2022, she was awarded the SRS Scholars of Colour Bursary for her work in Early Modern Studies.

Studying the Black Presence in early modern texts and contextually has been the bedrock of my research for the last six years. It all started in a Shakespeare lecture back when I was an undergraduate student. We were studying Titus Andronicus and discussing the character, Aaron. I came to the lecture bristling with ideas. I was especially taken with the language that was used in the tragedy. I found the epithet ‘Moor’ quite interesting; it struck me that Aaron’s race became an intrinsic part of his characterisation and how others in the text sought to weaponize his race and demonize him for it. An example of this is when Marcus dubs him a ‘black ill-favoured fly’.[1] Whilst I did not have the vocabulary to eloquently articulate my ideas, I was aware what these examples were evidence of: anti-Black racism. However, whilst we discussed Aaron in the lecture and the subsequent seminar, I was shocked that no one picked up on these ideas, that led me to question whether I was wrong in my examinations. This all changed in 2018 when I read Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible.  

Reading Habib’s work made me feel vindicated and valid. In the opening sections of Black Lives Habib writes that ‘scholars have been unable to regard historical blacks in the reigns of Elizabeth and her immediate successors as anything more than stray figures in an “anecdotal” landscape, too accidental and solitary to be even a historical statistic.’[2] I was one of these scholars. The lack of critical engagement and discussion of the Black Presence contextually in early modern England and in early modern texts in my undergraduate class made me second guess my own beliefs. It made me question what I saw right in front of my eyes: blatant examples of anti-Black racism. However, reading Black Lives gave me the vocabulary, strength and confidence I so desperately needed to pursue this important work. Countering the long established idea in early modern discourse that there were no Black people in early modern England, Habib also shows that ‘[…] obscure, truncated and largely inaccessible documentary records, which are only now becoming fully available, paint a very different picture about the size, continuity and historical seriousness of the black presence in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, well before English black populations become known through the transatlantic slave trade.’[3] 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. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Jamie Gemmell

Jamie Gemmell is a historian of race and power in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic World. He is an AHRC-funded History PhD student at King’s College, London. His project traces how London life changed in the wake of Atlantic slavery in the late seventeenth century. His project is titled “Reckoning with Race in Early Modern London, 1655-1712”. Jamie is Assistant Editor at the University of Maryland’s Slavery, Law, and Power Project and Project Director of jamesknightjamaica.com. He is former Editor-in-Chief of Retrospect Journal, where he co-edited “Race in Retrospective” with RACE.ED.

For Imtiaz Habib, the parish register “is the predominant source for [black] records” and “the most inclusive.” While these lists of baptisms, marriages, and burials were the result of Tudor dictate, “such dictates specified only purpose, not format”. As a result, the register’s format reflects “the non-standard orthography and improvisational documentary habits of the local clerical record keeper”.[1] In their randomness, they offer proximity to everyday social relations.[2] As argued by David Postles and Alexandra Shepard, the very ubiquity of these kinds of record permit an understanding of the early modern English structure that begins with social relations.[3] Habib skilfully uses the records to connect the growing numbers of encumbered Black lives, and their geographies, in the later seventeenth-century London registers to the emergence of empire and racial slavery.  Specifically, the registers add further context to the 1677 Butts v. Penny decision, a King’s Bench precedent that legalised racial slavery across England and its emerging empire, by revealing how social practices preceded, and necessitated, legal clarity from above.[4]

Here, I wish to build on Habib’s use of the London parish registers and present them as sites of contestation.[5] Since the publication of Habib’s Black Lives it has become easier to access these records via the London Metropolitan Archives’ “Switching the Lens” (StL) project. The project has databased and digitised the London Anglican parish registers that list people of African, Caribbean, Asian, and Indigenous American heritage between 1561 and 1840. While some work has been done on the individual lives revealed by StL, the dataset remains underused.[6] Between 1660 and 1730, the period of my research, there are 563 “black citations” within the StL dataset. Most of them are, relatively, standard. They note the date of the event (baptism, marriage, or burial), the individual’s name, and, in the cases examined here, include some kind of racial signifier. 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. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Montaz Marché

Montaz Marché is a writer, historian, presenter, and PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on early modern Black British history. Recently, her research has explored eighteenth-century gender, racial politics, and experiences of Black women in London. Her PhD thesis is titled ‘Mapping the Dark and Feminine: A Population of Black Women in Eighteenth-Century London’. She sits on the History Matters Online Journal editorial board and is the Artistic Director of the Ruckus Theatre Company, alongside regular work in historical public engagement and the media and television industry. 

Habib’s sentiment that this research into collecting Black lives is “a daunting task” was unsurprisingly accurate. But Habib exposed what is possible regarding the archives’ statistical and qualitative analysis of the Black population. His work made an essential intervention in British early modern historiography. He set a solid foundation of archival evidence of Black people in English archives and proved what details and cultural contexts could be revealed in these references, despite their brevity. Some examples include Black people’s religious practices, social interactions, and roles in English society. He aligns the Black lives he found in the archives to early modern global trends, such as the development of racial ideologies and chattel slavery, contextualising Black experiences and countering the narratives that Black people were “passive” in early modern England. What sets Habib apart is his emphasis on the research process alongside evidence and conclusions. This level of articulated nuance, investigation, and contextualisation about Black lives in Britain, rationalised with a detailed methodology, an understanding of the archive’s biases and its influence on our historical consciousness, was, in 2008, new and, as we would discover, long overdue to the field. As a historian focusing mostly on the eighteenth century, Habib’s research was a learning curve but also challenged me to take ideas of Black thought and agency one step further than his research. I reflect here on how Habib’s work helped me think about gender and race in the early modern period and how far the field has come.