Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell

Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives was situated within the longstanding and growing fields of early modern Black British History and Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS). To conclude our series, we provide a non-definitive bibliography of some key texts for readers interested in pursuing these subjects further.

• Catch up with all the posts in the Black Lives in the English Archives series.
• Download the bibliography (word doc).

Adi, Hakim (ed.). Black British History: New Perspectives. London: Zed Books, 2019.

Adi, Hakim. African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History. London: Penguin, 2022.

Akhimie, Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference London and New York: Routledge, 2018.

Amussen, Susan Dwyer. Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Chakravarty, Urvashi. Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987.

Dabydeen, David, Gilmore, John, and Jones, Cecily. The Oxford Companion to Black British History. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007.

Erickson, Peter. ‘Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance’, Criticism, 35, 4 (1993), pp.499-528

Floyd-Wilson, Mary. English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: A History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press, [1984] 2018.

Fuentes, Marisa. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive in the Urban British Caribbean. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

———- and Connolly, Brian. (eds.). ‘Slavery and the Archive’, Special Edition of History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, Vol 6, Issue 2, (2016).

Gerzina, Gretchen. Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History. Revised and Updated Edition. London: John Murray, 2022.

Gundara, Jagdish S., and Duffield, Ian (eds). Essays on the History of Blacks in Britain: From Roman Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century. Aldershot: Avebury, 1992.

Habib, Imtiaz. Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period. Lanham, MD: University of America Press, 2000.

Habib, Imtiaz. “Indians in Shakespeare’s England as “the First-Fruits of India”: Colonial Effacement and Postcolonial Reinscription.” Journal of Narrative Theory 36, no. 1 (2006): 1-19.

Habib, Imtiaz. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible. London: Routledge, [2008] 2020.

Habib, Imtiaz, and Salkeld, Duncan. “The Resonables of Boroughside, Southwark: An Elizabethan Black Family near the Rose Theatre.” Shakespeare 11, no. 2 (2015): 135-156.

Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Hartman, Saidiya, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Creatures: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019.

———-, ‘Venus in Two Acts’. Small Axe, 12, no. 2 (2008).

Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Hendricks, Margo. “Feminist Historiography.” Anita Pacheco (ed.). A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, 361-376. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

Iyengar, Sujata. Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Kaufmann, Miranda. Black Tudors. London: One World, 2018.

Lowe, K. J. P., and Earle T. F. (eds.). Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

MacDonald, Joyce Green. ‘Introduction’, in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance. Cranbury, London, Ontario: Associated University Presses, 1997. ed. Joyce Green MacDonald, pp.7-19.

Maguire, Richard C. Africans in East Anglia, 1467-1833. Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, 2021.

Mason Vaughan, Virginia. Performing Blackness on English Stages,1500-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Morgan, Jennifer L. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

Ndiaye, Noémie. Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

Newman, Simon, P. Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London. London: University of London Press, 2022.

Nubia, Onyeka. Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, Their Presence, Status and Origins. London: Narrative Eye, 2014.

Nubia, Onyeka. England’s Other Countrymen: Black Tudor Society. London: Zed Books, 2019.

Otele, Olivette. African Europeans: An Untold History. London: Hurst & Company, 2020.

Sanjurjo, Jesús. “Centring Blackness in European History: A European History Quarterly Forum.” European History Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2023): 5-44.

Shyllon, Folarin. Black People in Britain, 1555-1833. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Singh, Jyotsna G. “Hakluyt’s Books and Hawkins’ Slaving Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the English National Imaginary, 1560–1600.” Jyostna G. Singh. (ed.). A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500-1700, Second Edition, 249-275. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021.

Smith, Ian. ‘Barbarian Errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 2 (1998), pp.168-186.

———-, ‘The Textile Black Body: Race and “shadowed” livery in The Merchant of Venice’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality and Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp.170 – 184.

———-, ‘White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage’, Renaissance Drama (2003), pp.33-67.

Walvin, James. Black and White: The Negro and English Society 1555-1945. London: Allen Lane. The Penguin Press, 1973.

Weissbourd, Emily. ““Those in Their Possession”: Race, Slavery, and Queen Elizabeth’s “Edicts of Expulsion”. Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. (2015): 1-19.

Weissbourd, Emily. Bad Blood: Staging Race between Early Modern England and Spain. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023.

In 2015, Professor F. Hall, Professor Peter Erickson, and Hannah Ehrenberg created a bibliography of early modern race and premodern critical race studies. It is available here: https://ambereendadabhoy.com/2022/06/13/shakerace-bibliography/.