Embedded Files
Extract 1
Extract 1
“‘The Boy Who Deluded Him Away’ - the legacy of child trafficking in eighteenth-century Britain”
1753. London, England. A fourteen year old ‘Black’ boy with ‘long black Hair [and] a brown Livery Frock, which he has since chang’d with the Boy who deluded him away, and took him to Newmarket, from whence he set out alone on Tuesday last with the above Boy’s Coat, which is brown, with white metal Buttons; but ‘tis supposed has not chang’d Breeches, which are green Plush’.
1743. London, England. ‘Negro Boy, about seven Years of Age, and says his Name is Dover’, after four days, had ‘not yet been claimed by the Owner, nor [had s/he] advertised’.
[1709. London, England. ‘A Black Indian boy, 12 years of age, fit to wait on a gentleman, to be disposed of at Denis’s Coffee-house in French Lane near the Royal Exchange’.1 Zelda Maude Ayres, The Advertisements of the Tatler (London, 1910), p15. Also, see advertised FOR SALE in the Edinburgh Courant (30 August, 1766), ‘A Negro Woman, named Peggy... [and her] young CHILD A NEGRO BOY’, James Walvin, Black and White: the negro and English society 1555-1945 (Allen Lane, 1973), p132.]
1758. Inveraray, Scotland. Mrs. Campbell of Askomils (Inveraray) placed an advertisement for an unnamed ‘BLACK BOY, about 14 years of age’, with ‘short black curly hair [who has been gone] ‘About 15 or 16 days’.
1768. Cardiff, Wales. Mrs Sarah James posted no less than four adverts offering a ‘Five Guineas Reward, and reasonable Charges allowed’ for an ‘African Negro’ called Thomas Brown (Turpin), described as ‘well-set [who] has lost a Joint of one of his Fingers, his Teeth filed like those of a Saw, and has a remarkable Scar on his Back... [He] wears Curls instead of a Wig’.
1779. London, England. ‘MULATTO GIRL’ left in the care of the absconder, one Frances Gregory. ‘The said child is eight years old, tall and slim... Whoever harbours the said child, shall be prosecuted as the law directs’. (The threat of prosecution is repeated and strengthened in another publication.)
1765-66. Glasgow, Scotland. ‘A North-American Indian Boy. Looking to be about 14 years of age, of a very tawny complexion; stout made, broad, fat faced, black eye’d, with bristly black hair in his head, having the hair of one of his eye-lids white, his ears bored, a mixture of white hairs in his head, freckled like an adder in the neck, knees, and other parts of his body.... bare-footed, and speaks English very imperfectly, strayed from his masters house in Glasgow... He answers to the name Bob.’ (The advertisements ran in both Glasgow and Edinburgh newspapers - June 1765 to August 1766.)
1724. London, England. A fugitive 9 year-old ‘East-India Boy’ named Pompey, with a ‘Hole through his right Nostril and an Ear-Ring in his Left Ear’, reported absent for almost a month.”
Extract 2
Extract 2
“Gates and Curran annotate the sixteen ‘lost’ submissions sent to the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences in 1741. They also present three ‘bonus essays’ from 1772, the stimulus for that particular biennial prize (funded by an anonymous sponsor) being how to reduce the colossal mortality rates for African captives in transit. These early acts of European cooperation on ‘Whiteness’ formed part of an intercontinental conspiracy that Henry Highland Garnett credited to the ‘corrupt and sordid hearts [filled with] avarice and lust’ of reputedly cultured White men. The sub-human opposite - ‘Blackness’ – was requisite for thirty million live bodies (UNESCO) over time and place to be trepanned into slavery. The Swedish, Dutch, Irish and other Academy responders to this hypothesis understood that their inventiveness was restricted by the prevailing White theology, evoking Zora Neale Hurston’s truism that ‘Gods always behave like the people who made them’.
Alexander, Z. (2020) Who’s Black and Why?: a hidden chapter from the eighteenth-century invention of race, Andrew Curran and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (book review)”, Women's History Review, 32:1, 156-158.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2022.2103895
Extract 3
Extract 3
Extract 4
Extract 4
May 14th Sat 1881 Manchester Guardian р7. col g.
"The Black Country" -The Birmingham Post says “a singular rumour was afloat in the neighbourhood of Dudley, on thursday. The children of the Board schools on going home at noon informed their parents, that ‘three American black doctors' were to attend all the schools and vaccinate the scholars. The story caused considerable excitement, and in the afternoon the children were accompanied to school by their mothers, many of whom were armed. with pokers, chair-legs, and sundry other weapons. At the Wolverhampton Street Board School the assurance of the master that there was no intention to vaccinate the children was not accepted, and as the attitude of the mothers became very threatening the assistance of the police had to be obtained, and all idea of holding the afternoon school abandoned. At Gornal windows were broken because the crowd could not be convinced in time that there was no truth in the story.”
Extract 5
Extract 5
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani (2018). “My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader”, The New Yorker, (July 15).
Long before Europeans arrived, Igbos enslaved other Igbos as punishment for crimes, for the payment of debts, and as prisoners of war. The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life. When the transatlantic trade began, in the fifteenth century, the demand for slaves spiked. Igbo traders began kidnapping people from distant villages. Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. I don’t want to see them again.’ ” Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, nearly one and a half million Igbo slaves were sent across the Middle Passage.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-great-grandfather-the-nigerian-slave-trader
Extract 6
Extract 6
BBC News (2022). “Why slave descendants want the Benin Bronzes to stay in US”, (November 7).
Extract 7
Extract 7
Coolies: How Britain Re-Invented Slavery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cncg3yhWPI
David Dabydeen: a series like ‘Roots’ would help the British public understand indentureship
Ameena Gafoor Institute
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