Black London: Life Before Emancipation.

Reviewed by

Anthony G. Barthelemy University of Miami 

Black London undertakes to dispel the falsehood that England did not become a multiethnic society until the twentieth century. Gerzina musters abundant, incontrovertible evidence to prove that there were significant numbers of Africans in England as early as 1596. Some of the evidence has appeared elsewhere, and unfortunately Gerzina does not always seem to be familiar with some earlier work on the subject of Africans in preeighteenth-century England. However, when she delves into the daily lives of Africans in the eighteenth-century London, she produces much new and interesting material. Much of this evidence is present by way of anecdote, and again it seems unfortunate that Gerzina does not subject much of this evidence to any interesting or sophisticated analysis. The first three chapters tell the stories of London's black paupers and the servants of sophisticated English ladies and gentlemen. With several illustrations and excerpts from diaries and other personal writings, Gerzina delves deeply into the personal lives of these people. She documents white attitudes toward black men, women, and children as she portrays with sensitivity and sympathy the successes, failures, sorrows, and joys of those Africans or descendants of Africans who found themselves in eighteenth-century London.

The second three chapters of the book investigate the beginnings of the antislavery movement in London. Here Gerzina is at her best. Starting with Granville Sharp's recognition of the cruelties of slavery, Gerzina follows Sharp's increasing involvement in efforts to end slavery in England and the slave trade in general. In the process she details the fascinating court case of James Somerset and the deliberations of Lord James Mansfield, the Chief Justice who presided over the case. Ruling that a slave could not be forced to leave England with his master, the Somerset decision had profound repercussions throughout England and the Americas; some even believed erroneously that the decision had outlawed slavery in England. Gerzina moves from this case to Sharp's efforts at establishing a colony for Africans in England on the West Coast of Africa in what is present-day Sierra Leone. Here again, with a combination of skills from storyteller to historian, she recounts the intriguing story of governmental and private efforts to rid England yet again of its Africans. When Gerzina reports that men like Sharp and others opposed to slavery and the slave trade acted frequently from racist efforts not to turn England into a nation of Ethiopians, one wonders how the author could have been surprised, since David Brion Davis deals so thoroughly with other such abolitionist sentiment in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. But overall these last three chapters make for interesting reading, even if Gerzina's anecdotal style does not always provide the kind of scholarly analysis one might hope for.