Black Lives in the Restoration Household: The Queen’s Account

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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.

Susannah Lyon-Whaley

Susannah Lyon-Whaley is completing her PhD in Art History at the University of Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand on the Stuart queen consort Catherine of Braganza.

Imtiaz Habib’s groundbreaking study Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (2008) searches for traces of its subjects in parish registers, legal documents, and also amidst the records of the royal court. Histories of European kings and queens – even to the present day – often say little about black lives, yet royal records offer rich, if sporadic, evidence of these. To establish the presence of African slaves in the train of Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish princess who arrived in England in 1501 to marry Henry VIII’s older brother, Habib looks to official letters and the accounts of bystanders.[1] While these records are rich, their references to black lives are not easy to find but must be mined, likely why Habib does not apply the same detail to the Restoration court of the seventeenth century (c. 1660-1688) as he does to the household of the Spanish princess.

Similar to many of Habib’s finds, the £2 paid “To the Lady Wood ffor the Blackemores Lienning [linen]” – in 1663 in the accounts of Catherine of Braganza (1638-1705), Portuguese queen consort of Charles II (r. 1649/1660-1685), is easily glossed over, sandwiched between payments to attendants at the waters of the spa at Tunbridge Wells and for gold to play at cards. While ‘Lady Wood’ can be identified as Dame Mary Wood (d. 1665) through her appearance in Catherine’s household lists, the ‘Blackemores’ – a phrase indicating African heritage – are not named, gendered, nor even quantified.[2]  By the Restoration, Habib argues that blackness was more likely to be associated with enforced servitude.[3] What, then, can the ‘queen’s account’ of these lives tell us about black lives in the Restoration household? Continue reading →

Love Me or Leave Me: Black Lives in the English Archives, A Response

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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.

Jacqui Stanford, PhD

I thought I knew what I would call this post. Someone had kindly dropped a citation in the chat as a group of people working on race in medieval/early modern Britain met in an online symposium discussing Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives. My contributions to the symposium were really me still responding in my head to the final words in another book. That book had taken Habib to task on the idea of black slaves being in Britain in Tudor times, and Habib’s decision to include as many people in his database as their names suggested they were Black to him, Blackmoore and its variations being a chief source. I hadn’t even read Habib’s Black Lives when I was reading the critique, yet I felt protective of Habib and had a willingness also to allow what he had done. Call it instinct…

Now, I am sitting on my own book. Rather it’s sitting inside of me. Rather it’s a maelstrom seething begrudgingly in the depths of me. For it is time.

My book’s about six Black individuals I discovered in the archives. Others have seen their names before me. My six are not unknown. They are listed and noted in the parish registers, although they have remained out of focus as other things and people, who share the same pages on which they are recorded come into focus. No one as yet has taken up the detritus about them. Removed the dust, excavated the site of their burial in a single line, if that, set in parchment. There they lay, sullen, aggrieved; … something caught my eye. Continue reading →

Amantacha: An Indigenous American in Seventeenth-Century English News from Canada to Suffolk

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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 →

Black lives in the Berkshire Archives: Making the Imperceptible Perceptible

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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 →

Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: Introduction

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Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell

Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Routledge, 2008) is one text within the relatively small, but longstanding, field of early modern Black British History. Neither a cultural history of early modern racialisation nor a social history of Black Britons, the text is a kind of analytical cataloguing that seeks to locate a “missing subject” through the literal construction of an archive and an accompanying commentary. It manages to be both empirically rigorous – Habib located 448 “Black citations” – and theoretically rich. It provides a roadmap and a grammar for the social historian to think carefully about early modern England’s Black inhabitants and the archives that render those lives (il)legible.

Habib’s herculean effort in 2008 highlighted, and continues to highlight, the importance of adopting an interdisciplinary approach when looking at the lives of people of colour in early modern Britain. In its robust, rigorous, and in-depth analysis, Black Lives laid a solid foundation which Early Modern Studies continues to build on. Habib’s bridging of the gap between the historical and literary disciplines has enabled Early Modern Studies to create a holistic idea of what it was like to be a person of colour in the early modern period and to track the origins of racism.

Despite its weighty contributions, the text remains relatively neglected by social historians and, in some cases, actively dismissed. Our Symposium seeks to reflect on Habib’s Black Lives and firmly establish its importance to Early Modern Studies, particularly social history. This is especially important given the emergence of the “archive” as a heuristic within Black Feminist literature, Atlantic History, and Slavery Studies. While scholars have critically interrogated the colonial archives, less attention has been paid to the archives of the imperial metropole. Habib’s work is, therefore, an ideal way to integrate these archives and think relationally across different methodologies. We hope the reflections published here will demonstrate both the importance of Habib’s work and the vitality of scholarship thinking about early modern Britain’s Black inhabitants. Continue reading →

Reflecting on Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium

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trumpeters-cropped

The many-headed monster is delighted to bring you a series of posts responding to Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Ashgate: 2008, Routledge: 2020). The posts are part of Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell’s multi-event symposium, which brings together scholars working at the forefront of early modern Black history and premodern race studies to discuss the vital importance and continuing legacy of Habib’s text.

Rebecca and Jamie will introduce the blog series on Thursday 4 May, and we will then publish two posts a week over the following month – links to all the posts will be added to this page as we go, so you can bookmark it now if you want to follow along.

Rebecca and Jamie celebrated the publication of the blog series on Friday 19 May, at the London Metropolitan Archives, to tie in with their ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition. This exhibition presents the stories of Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous heritage who lived and worked in the city between 1560 and 1860 and are recorded in London’s archives.

The Early Career Researcher Takeover

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The #MonsterTakeover showcased the research of our postgraduate and early career researchers as we handed over control to our readers in the first half of 2021. This post handily provides links to all of the posts in case you missed it.

It is early 2021. Large parts of the globe are in lockdown to try to limit the ravages of the covid-19 pandemic. Conferences and Symposia are postponed and there is still a long road to travel back to ‘normal’. What better moment to give you an alternative way to encounter and engage with cutting edge research on the past, in a digestible format that can fit in around online teaching, caring duties, daily exercise and lying on the floor in a darkened room breathing deeply, etc?

Below you will find links to posts written by early career scholars (baggily defined as budding historians who do not have a permanent job), showcasing their research and airing views on academic life. We are closed to new submissions for now, but we’ll probably be back with another issue of the Monster ECR Takeover in the future!

Continue reading →

Historians, PhDs, and Jobs in 2023

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Brodie Waddell

Amid yet another year of university strikes in the UK, the Higher Education Statistics Agency has released the latest data on staff and degrees granted. A couple of years ago, I used this data to try to get a sense of the job market for historians, so it seems like a good time to use the new figures to provide an update.

First, let’s take a look at what’s happening in the USA, where they are able to provide a more rigorous view of the job market because the American Historical Association tracks job advertisements and provides an annual report. In previous years, the AHA reports had been published with a Chart of Doom which showed the catastrophic collapse of job openings relative to degrees granted:

Advertised job openings and new history PhDs awarded

Advertised job openings and new history PhDs awarded: AHA Jobs Report 2021.

In their most recent report, from August 2022, they decided not to publish the Chart of Doom and instead have presented the information about job openings over a more short-term timescale, with more details about the types of jobs advertised. This is very useful information, though it does elide the massive drop in jobs that happened just before the chart starts in 2016-17. In the most recent year, 2021-22, they show ‘academic job listings did indeed rebound to levels above those seen immediately before the pandemic. This increase is not, however, a sign of renewed vitality but a partial return to the steady but dismal state of faculty job availability in the late 2010s.’ Continue reading →

Fact checking the Flying House of Loreto: Early Modern Truth and Doubt

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This post is part of the Monster Carnival 2022 – Why Early Modern History Matters Now. Dr Emily Price is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University. She tweets at @dremilyprice.

Emily Price

‘Truth isn’t truth.’ Rudy Giuliani on Meet the Press, 19 August 2018

How do we know if something is true? It might seem self-evident: a thing is true if it really happened and we can prove that it happened. But over the last half-decade, especially in my home country, the United States, we’ve been presented with a seeming paradox regarding the nature of truth. Truth is apparently both subjective (some of us simply believe in “alternative facts”) and objective (everyone knows the 2020 presidential election was stolen). These shifting concepts can be very disorienting as we try to make sense of the present and plan for the future.

Early modern people, living through a time of rapid political and religious change, also experienced this disorientation. While both Protestants and Catholics believed in miracles, for example, they differed on how to verify them. People wondered if they could trust the historical record, eyewitness accounts, or even their own senses. In my work, I examine an especially contentious claim relating to the Holy House of the Annunciation, the building within which the Virgin Mary had received the Angel Gabriel and where she and Joseph had raised the infant Christ. It was claimed that after the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was returned to Muslim control the Holy House had flown from Nazareth to Italy in 1291. Looking at how early modern people attempted to prove this miracle can help us better understand our own complicated, changing relationship with proof and doubt.

Continue reading →

Building Back Better – A Rather Old (and Rather Successful) Early Modern (German) Hat

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This post is part of the Monster Carnival 2022 – Why Early Modern History Matters Now. Philipp Rössner is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester and works on the history of commerce, capitalism, and economic thought in Britain, Germany, and Europe more broadly, from the late-medieval period to the present day.

Build(ing) Back Better – An idea developed a long time ago

As usual, history – whilst not exactly repeating itself – keeps coming back; often from unexpected corners; and things that may seem innovative, original or inventive on the surface turn out, upon second inspection, to be old wine in new bottles. The new UK industrial policy (Build Back Better) is, in fact, such an example. Based on “collaboration between industry, science and government,” focused on strengthening urban life (the 21st century global way of life, as it seems) and creativity, it centres on “Strong and active government investing massively in science and technology, coupled with a dynamic enterprise economy.” This paradigm echoes the “Cameralist” model of capitalism, occasionally also known as “mercantilism”: a model developed in early modern Europe, popularised and practiced in the German speaking lands, but widely adopted in Sweden, Denmark-Norway, Finland, even Portugal and Spain. Cameralism amounted to something like an early modern mainstream political economy and early ideology of growth. Radically pro-innovation, pro-market, pro-creativity and pro-government at the same time, it aimed at achieving lasting economic change and development through proactive government intervention; simultaneously enhancing the quality of economic activities (focusing on employment, adding value and raising productivity) and of economic life. This included, apart from mission orientated industrial policy, wider measures of public welfare including clean streets, safe roads, and sound quarantine rules in times of pandemics. The Cameralist model laid the foundations for the wealth of nations and significantly helped Europe undergo the crucial transitions toward industrialisation and modern economic growth.

The Political Economy of Transformation and Growth – The Case of Early Modern Cameralism

As I argue in a new book, early modern Germans were generally literate and well-trained; manufacturing was ubiquitous, and German entrepreneurs were involved in global trades. But in terms of living standards, income levels and trade connectivity Germany was hampered by a general crisis and the disastrous Thirty Years War, lagging behind France, Netherlands and England (after 1707: the UK). But the toolkit to move out of the development trap was there. Since the Renaissance but especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth century Cameralist political economy – extending far beyond the German-speaking countries covered under the unwieldy umbrella also known as ‘Holy Roman Empire’ ­– became increasingly focused on achieving economic growth through new outlooks on the open human future, proactively interventionist government helping the economy through providing well-designed markets, supporting manufacturing and other high value adding activities; well-regulated monetary systems, and strategies aimed at stimulating the level of circulation or – in contemporary economic lingo – increasing the “vivacity” of economic life. A centrepiece was the creation of productive and efficient manufacturing landscapes transforming nations from simple-life agrarian into increasingly literate, productive, urbanised and industrialised capitalist commonwealths.

Cameralist political economy thus made a signature contribution to the wealth of nations. During the nineteenth century Germany became one of the leading industrial powers.

Continue reading →