A HISTORY OF

BLACK AND ASIAN

WRITING IN BRITAIN,
: oo.ooo
C.L. INNES
University of Kent, Canterbury
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Innes, Catherine Lynette.
A history of Black and Asian writing in Britain / C.L. Innes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isnx o .: 6. q (hardback)
:. English literature Black authors History and criticism. .. English literature
Asian authors History and criticism. . Blacks Great Britain Intellectual life.
. Asians Great Britain Intellectual life. . Blacks in literature.
6. Asians in literature. i. Title.
rn:.o.n i .oo.
8.o.q

8q6o: dc.: .oo.o.66.

isnx o .: 6. q hardback
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements page vii
Chronological table of historical and literary events ix
List of illustrations xxi
Introduction :
: First encounters: the historical context
. Eighteenth-century letters and narratives: Ignatius Sancho,
Olaudah Equiano, and Dean Mahomed :
Speaking truth for freedom and justice: Robert Wedderburn
and Mary Prince 6
The imperial century .
Querying race, gender, and genre: nineteenth-century
narratives of escape 8
6 Travellers and reformers: Mary Seacole and B.M. Malabari :.6
Connecting cultures: Cornelia and Alice Sorabji :.
8 Ending empire :6
q Duse Mohamed Ali, anti-imperial journals, and black
and Asian publishing :8.
:o Subaltern voices and the construction of a global vision .oo
:: Epilogue .
Notes .
Notes on writers .6
Bibliography .8
Index o:
v
Illustrations
: Frontispiece to Olaudah Equianos Interesting Narrative (:8q).
Reproduced by permission of The British Library page :8
. Frontispiece to :8o edition of The Letters of Ignatius Sancho.
Reproduced by permission of The British Library .q
Frontispiece to Dean Mahomets Travels (:q). Reproduced
by permission of The British Library
Ellen Craft disguised as a Gentleman, from Running a Thousand
Miles for Freedom (:86o). Reproduced by permission of The
British Library :o
Frontispiece and illustration from Mary Seacoles Wonderful
Adventures (:8). Reproduced by permission of The British
Library :.
xxi
cn\r+rn :
First encounters: the historical context
Although there is evidence that African soldiers came to Britain with
the Roman armies in order to keep the restless natives under control,
it is not until the beginnings of European imperial expansion and slave
trading that they begin to make a signicant appearance in literature by
and about them. Peter Fryer notes the presence of a group of Africans,
seized from a Portuguese slave ship, in the court of James IV of Scotland
at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
:
One of these may have been
the lady that landet furth of the last schippis mockingly celebrated
by William Dunbar in Of Ane Blak-Moir, of which the third stanza
reads:
Quhen schou is claid in reche apparrall,
Schou blinkis als brycht as ane tar barrell;
Quhen schou was born, the son tholit clippis,
The nicht be fain faucht in hi querrell:
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
.
The poem perhaps refers to the black lady who is featured in the
tournament of the black lady and the black knight, an event which took
place in :o with King James playing the role of the black knight, and
which was repeated in :o8.

During the same period, there are records of a black trumpeter in the
court of Henry VII, whowas paid8pence a day for his services. Some fty
years later, in :, a group of ve Africans were brought from Ghana
to England to learn English so that they could act as interpreters for
English traders who had become aware of the wealth to be gained from
dealing in gold, ivory and spices on the West Coast of Africa.

English
traders and travellers brought reports which added to the mingling of
factual anecdotes and fabulous legends which dated as far back as Plinys
accounts, written in the rst century \n and translated as A Summarie of
the Antiquities. And Wonders of the Worlde in :66. Such a pot-pourri of rst

8 A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain

person narrative and myth is represented in Othellos account of the
tales which won Desdemonas heart:
Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by ood and eld,
Of hair-breadth scapes i thimminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence,
And portance in my travellers history,
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak. Such was my process,
And of the cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

As the editor of Othello in the Norton Shakespeare notes, this speech and
other works by Shakespeare draw on Pliny (who uses the term Anthro-
pophagi), Mandeville and Hakluyt. Presumably also the mention by
Othello of his boyhood enslavement reects current awareness of the
Portuguese, Spanish, and English slave trade.
English involvement in the slave trade as a means of making a large
prot began with the purchase and seizure by John Hawkyns in :6.
of some oo Africans, whom he then sold to Spanish plantation own-
ers in the Caribbean. Queen Elizabeth lent him a ship, The Jesus of
Lubeck, to make a further voyage in :6, and Hawkyns was given an
ofcial crest which showed a demi-Moor proper bound captive, with
amulets on his arms and ears together with a coat of arms display-
ing three black men shackled with slave-collars.
6
During the sixteenth
century Africans, and then Asians, were brought in smaller numbers
to England and Scotland as slaves, domestic servants, and prostitutes.
There are records of several musicians and entertainers at the court
of Elizabeth, and also of entertainments involving her courtiers wear-
ing blackface, a custom which Ben Jonsons Masque of Blackness (:6o)
shows continuing after her death.

Despite her enjoyment of such en-

tertainments, however, Elizabeth did not approve of the growing num-
bers of black people resident in the country. A letter sent in :q6 to
the mayor of London and the mayors and sheriffs of other towns com-
manded that such people should be deported: Her Majestie under-
standing that there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this
realme, of which kinde of people there are already here to manie . . .
Her Majestys pleasure therefore ys that those kinde of people should be
First encounters: the historical context q
sent forth of the lande . . .
8
Elizabeth commissioned a Dutch merchant to
arrest any black people in the land and take them to Spain or Portugal.
Five years later the same merchant was again encouraged to rid the
country of black people. In terms which are echoed in some of the more
virulent rhetoric of the present era regarding refugees, immigrants, and
asylum seekers, Elizabeth issued a second proclamation in which she
declared herself
highly discontented to understand the great number of negars and Black-
amoores which (as she is informed) are crept into this realm. . . who are fostered
and relieved here to the great annoyance of her own liege people, that want the
relief, which these people consume, as also for that the most of themare indels,
having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel.
q
Elizabeths proclamations are issued during the same period that
English merchants were setting up systematic trading contacts with
India. On New Years Eve :6oo, she granted a charter to the East
India Company as the sole traders in the East and India. Twelve years
later the Moghul emperor Jehangir granted the East India Company a
mandate for trade in India, and during the seventeenth century trad-
ing stations or factories were established in Madras, Bombay, and
Calcutta. During these early years when very few white women went
out to India, there was considerable interchange and some marriages
between the British and the native population, despite the usual prac-
tice of separating white expatriate enclaves fromthe Black Town where
native employees lived.
:o
The next .oo years saw a rapid increase in British involvement in col-
onization and plantation in Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean,
together with ourishing trade with India and Africa, including the
slave trade. The historian Dale H. Porter reports that by : mer-
chants from London, Liverpool, and Bristol were carrying an average
of 6o,ooo African slaves across the Atlantic each year. Not only did the
slave trade itself bring large prots (a slave bought in Africa for goods
worth : would be sold in North America or the Caribbean to English
or Spanish plantation owners for between and o), but it was
intertwined with other lucrative trading and manufacture. Subsidiary
industries which ourished in England included shipbuilding and the
manufacture of iron manacles and chains, as well as goods such as East
Indian cotton and British manufactured weapons which were traded for
slaves in West Africa. Ships returning from the West Indies and America
were loaded with tobacco and sugar, the latter being in great demand to
:o A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain
sweetenthe coffee and tea whichcame fromthe newcolonies and trading
areas. Many bankers and merchants in London, Liverpool, Bristol, and
other cities owned whole or part shares in the slave ships, and a sub-
stantial portion of the British economy depended on the slave trade, the
West Indian plantations, and the industries which accompanied them.
::
Such dependency was openly acknowledged and encouraged by many
merchants and members of parliament, for example the MP Charles
Davenant in his Discourses on the Publick Revenues:
So great a part of our Foreign Business arising from these Colonies, they ought
undoubtedly to have all due Encouragement, and to be plentifully supplyd,
and at reasonable rates, with Negroes to cultivate and meliorate the Land. The
labour of these Slaves, is the principal Foundation of our Riches there; upon
which account we should take all probable Measures to bring themto us at easie
Terms . . .
Slaves are the rst and most necessary Material for Planting; from whence
follows, That all Measures should be taken that may produce such a Plenty of
them, as may be an Encouragement to the industrious Planter.
:.
Slaves were brought to England to serve the ships captains, or given
to their friends, or accompanied American and West Indian owners and
their families when they visited England. The increasing presence of
black people in England and Scotland is recorded in bill posters and
newspapers advertising sales of slaves or offering rewards for runaway
slaves. They appear also in paintings, prints, and cartoons, including
many by Hogarth. David Dabydeen remarks on the variety of occupa-
tions and roles assigned to black people in the hundreds of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century paintings and prints: footmen, coachmen, page-
boys, soldiers, sailors, musicians, actresses, prostitutes, beggars, prisoners,
pimps, highway robbers, street-sellers, and other similar roles.
:
These
visual images show Indian as well as African children posed in very sim-
ilar positions as pageboys and servants (see for example the paintings by
Lely of Elizabeth Countess of Dysart and Charlotte Fitzroy
:
) and advertise-
ments appear in the papers for a runaway Bengal Boy (:) and for
a lost East-India Tawny Black (:).
:
As Dabydeen points out, many
of these portraits and prints illustrate the degree to which black and
Indian servants had become commodities, signiers of status in a culture
which displayed ostentatiously its wealth and power through the exotica
shipped home from the colonies and trading empires. The print, Taste in
High Life (after Hogarth) shows a small African boy dressed in turban and
plumes, as much an exotic pet as the little poodle in coat and bonnet,
First encounters: the historical context ::
in a room bedecked with images and objects from China, India, France,
and other worlds.
During the eighteenth century, what had been primarily a trading
relationship with India, which left that countrys own institutions and
customs relatively unchanged, became a colonial one, with a stronger
military presence. Robert Clive rst contested the Frenchparticipationin
trade with India, and then went on to defeat the ruler of Bengal, Siraj-ud-
Daula, in :, establishing the East India Company as the main power
in Bengal. Enormous wealth was acquired by British nabobs who went
to India to make their fortunes, often returning with Indian servants to
adorn their establishments in England. In :, Warren Hastings was
appointed governor general of all the East India Company provinces in
India, and in :8 the British government appointed a Board of Control
in London with a British administrative arm, served, except in the lowest
ranks, by British and Anglo-Irish men. Many of these men took their
wives with them, and these families in turn brought back maids, ayahs,
and other servants they had hired in India. Warren Hastings and his
wife brought back two Indian boys, aged about thirteen, as well as four
maids who were later sent back to India because they refused to work
any harder than in India and wanted to lead exactly the same life.
:6
The
populationof Britainalso beganto include many lascars, the sailors who
were hired, or in many cases kidnapped, to serve as crew for the East
India trading ships, and then abandoned, sometimes without being paid,
when the ship docked in England. In :86, a committee of relief was set
up to help such destitute sailors, later widening its brief to include other
destitute black people, as The Committee for the Relief of the Black
Poor. The committee reported that it had located .o black people in
need of relief, including from the East Indies. Among those selected
to settle in Sierra Leone as a place of repatriation was a twenty-nine-
year-old sailor from Bengal.
:
Estimates as to the number of black people living in Britain in
the late eighteenth century vary between ten and twenty thousand.
In a population of approximately three million, they were a visible
minority, and their visibility was remarked upon by visitors as well
as Englishmen. Philipp Thickness comments in :88 that London
abounds with an incredible number of these black men. . . in every
country town, nay in almost every village are to be seen a little race
of mulattoes, mischievous as monkies and innitely more dangerous.
:8
In The Prelude Wordsworth looked back upon the pleasing variety of
:. A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain
peoples he encountered when he travelled to London fromCambridge in
:q::
Among the crowd all specimens of man,
Through all the colours which the sun bestows,
And every character of form and face:
The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south,
The Frenchman and the Spaniard; fromremote
America, The Hunter-Indian; Moors,
Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,
And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns.
:q
As James Walvin points out, the increasing visibility in Britain of black
people, many of whom were slaves or former slaves, brought to the fore
the contradictions and tensions between Britains self-identity as the
home of liberty and human rights and its role as a participant in the
slave trade and the institution of slavery: The society which established
the primacy of parliamentary power, and conrmed individual liberties
before the law, was equally responsible for the development of black chat-
tel slavery.
.o
As long as slavery seemed to exist mainly in the colonies it
could more easily be ignored. But the presence in Britain and Ireland
of black men and women who had experienced slavery made possible
the powerful testimony to the humanity of Africans and the brutalities of
slavery, both of which were denied or ignored by the supporters of slavery
and its economic benets. The issue was also highlighted in a series of
legal cases which tested the extent of the commitment of England and
Scotland to human rights and then in the erce debate around the abo-
lition of the slave trade which took place between :8 and :8o. The
abolitionist movement was the biggest political mass movement which
England had ever witnessed, involving over :oo petitions and oo,ooo
signatories to them. It is in the context of this debate that much of the
writing by black people was rst produced and read; the legal, economic,
social, cultural and literary discourses relating to slavery provide a series
of arguments and representations about the status of black people in re-
lation to English men and women which called for an explicit or implicit
response by the rst black writers and their readers.
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Eighteenth-century black British writers wrote and were read in a variety
of cultural and social contexts. The one that loomed most threateningly
First encounters: the historical context :
and oppressively was the slave trade and slavery, and with it the debates
for and against abolition. For many black people in Britain, slavery was
not merely a past experience, but also a continuing threat. In :q, the
attorney general, Sir Philip Yorke, reafrmed the status as mere property
of people who had been purchased as slaves, even though they were
now on British soil or baptized Christians, and conrmed as paramount
the property rights of slave traders and plantation owners who wished
to retain and return them to the West Indies or other colonies.
.:
In
the case of James Somerset, whose Boston master had brought him to
England and when he ran away recaptured him to be shipped back to
Massachusetts, Judge Manseeld in :. reversed the YorkeTalbot
ruling, declaring that the laws of another country could not apply in
England. However, this ruling did not, and was not intended to end slav-
ery in Britain; indeed, Manseeld expressed considerable concern about
the effects of freeing no less than :,ooo slaves now in England whose
worth he computed at approximately oo,ooo.
..
For years afterwards,
notices of sales and wanted notices for runaway slaves continued to
appear in newspapers, coffee shops, and other public gathering places.
Only in Scotland, which functioned under a different legal system, was
slavery judged to be illegal in the Knight v Wedderburn case in :8, when
Joseph Knight contested his enslavement by John Wedderburn, who
had purchased him in Jamaica as a boy and brought him to Scotland.
It was ruled that no man or woman in the territory of Scotland could
be enslaved, and that the laws of Jamaica could not apply to Scotland.
In :88 the lucrative triangular trade between Britain, Africa, and
the Americas involved more than :o ships sailing from English ports
(mainly Bristol, London, and Liverpool), with approximately one million
pounds worthof goods manufacturedinBritainfor trade inAfrica. These
goods were partly sold and partly exchanged in that year for over 6o,ooo
slaves imported from Africa, and then sold for between o and o
each in the Americas. The ships then returned to Britain with cargoes
of rum, tobacco, and sugar. In :8 the view that African slaves were
mere merchandise was emphasized in the case of an insurance claim
brought by the owners of the ship Zong. A total of :o sick slaves had
beenthrownoverboard so that the ships owner could claiminsurance for
property abandoned by necessity (the claim was that water was scarce,
although the ship arrived in port with oo gallons of water to spare). Had
the slaves simply died through natural causes, the insurance could not
have been claimed. The case was brought to the attention of Granville
Sharp by Olaudah Equiano, and Sharp attempted to bring a charge of
: A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain
mass murder against the captain and crew. The prosecution was blocked
by the solicitor general, John Lee, who asserted that the blacks were
property: This is a case of chattels or goods. It is really so; it is the case of
throwing over goods; for to this purpose and the purpose of insurance,
they are goods and property: whether right or wrong we have nothing to
do with.
.
Only in :q6 did an English court rule that slaves could not be
treated simply as merchandise in a case where a Liverpool trader sought
to recover insurance for :.8 Africans who had starved to death on a long
voyage.
.
The slave-trade was not abolished in England until :8o.
Even after slavery was declared illegal in England, the identity of black
people remained blurred with the correlation in most peoples minds
between slavery and black skins, ironically a correlation often reinforced
by the anti-slavery crusades. Hence, the condition and background
of slavery and the discourses surrounding it were almost inevitably an
important part of the context in which black writers sought to dene
their own identities, to create their own voices, and to enter into dialogue
with the community they now chose to belong to on their terms where
once they were forced to belong on others terms.
The identication of black people with slavery was both strengthened
and contested by the growth of the empire, which entailed Englands
increasingly dominant role as a ruling nation and metropolitan centre,
and her encounter with other cultures and their artefacts. Within the
growing empire, and in the context of increasing commerce and trade
from India and Africa, and the culture of consumption and commodity
goods, black and south Asian people became yet another exotic import,
a commodity which bestowed status on their owners. Thus, as noted
above, black servants, grooms, and pages were frequently portrayed in
many eighteenth-century portraits and group pictures, accompanying
their wealthy mistresses, and masters, and their animals. Such pages
were often dressed in exotic livery, featuring turbans and robes which
might have little to do with their ancestral cultures, and much more to
do with an orientalist perception of those regions. In such outts, they
were an adornment like the ostrich and peacock feathers, the paisley
shawls, the silks, which adorned their mistresses.
.
In literature, a series of characters were developed and reiterated
or replayed to denote the various paradigms into which black and
Indian people were inserted in order to represent varied contexts
and attitudes. Such paradigms can be seen in the construction of
Othello and Oroonoko, on the one hand, and in the gure of the black
servant or fool and Man Friday, on the other. It is interesting to note
First encounters: the historical context :
that Othello was particularly popular in the eighteenth century and was
performed much more frequently than Shakespeares other plays, apart
from Hamlet and Macbeth. C.B. Hogan gives a total of .6 performances
of Othello in London between :oo and :o, compared with :86 for
Lear, :6 for Julius Caesar, q6 for Romeo and Juliet (8 for Hamlet, .8 for
Macbeth).
.6
Also particularly popular was Thomas Southernes drama-
tization of Aphra Behns Oroonoko, in which perhaps in the context
of Othello Oroonokos wife becomes a white woman rather than an
African. Numerous versions were presented on stage in the eighteenth
century. In :q, for example, there were three different adaptations
playing in London, in one of which (by Frances Gentleman) the anti-
slavery theme becomes much more prominent. Both Othello and Oroonoko
present the type of the noble, highly articulate and seductive African,
whose passionate nature brings himto a tragic end. It is in this paradigm
that one of the rst supposedly factual biographies of an African may
have been read when it was rst published in :, Thomas Bluetts Some
Memoirs of the Life of Job, which reports some events in the life of Ayuba
Suleiman Diallo. Diallo was a Muslimmerchant in West Africa, who was
kidnapped and enslaved in Maryland. He was rescued and ultimately
freed by Bluett, brought to England, made the acquaintance of a number
of English gentlemen, was ransomed by his father, and returned to Africa
laden with presents from his English friends. Bluett records these details
about Diallo and his country at the request of Diallo, seeking to give such
particulars of the life and character of this African Gentleman, as I think
will be most useful and entertaining, endeavouring to make the whole as
agreeable as the nature of the subject and the limits of this pamphlet will
allow.
.
Black people like Ignatius Sancho were perceived and perceived
themselves as Othello-like. His friend Stevenson tells the story of an
encounter in the streets of London with a young white dandy who
shouted out to him, Smoke Othello! Sancho immediately placing
himself across the path, before him, exclaimed with a thundering voice
and a countenance which awed the delinquent, Aye, Sir, such Othellos
you meet with but once in a century, clapping his hand upon his goodly
round paunch. Such Iagos as you we meet with in every dirty passage.
Proceed, Sir!
.8
One of his letters refers to his shared foolishness with
a number of black people, including Othello. Equiano, in a note to a
letter preceding his Narrative and refuting the claim that his account was
false, quotes Othellos nal speech, Speak of me as I am, / Nothing
extenuate, nor set down aught / In malice.
.q
:6 A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain
Other eighteenth-century plays and operas sometimes featured black
characters. In particular Isaac Bickerstaffes comic operas portrayed
black captives and servants. The protagonist of his Love in the City (:6),
Priscilla Tomboy, is a West Indian (white) orphan whose imperious and
cruel treatment of her black servant Quasheba is contrasted with the
compassionate behaviour of her English friend, Penelope. The Padlock
(:68) features a black servant, Mungo, who is lazy and gullible, but also
quick witted. Bickerstaffe gives him what purports to be African dialect.
And The Sultan (:), like The Padlock, represents themes of captivity and
liberation through the gure of Roxana, a rebellious and ungovernable
English slave who persuades her master to set the captive women in
his harem free. The late eighteenth century also saw a strenuous output
of anti-slavery poems and pamphlets, many of which were circulated
in thousands as part of the campaign to abolish the slave-trade. These
include William Cowpers The Negros Complaint (:88), Jamiesons
The Sorrows of Slavery: A Poem (:8q), and Hannah Mores Slavery:
A Poem (:88).
But attitudes towards black people, and opinions about their capaci-
ties and their humanity, differed widely within Britain and the colonies.
Although Hogarth could write about the aesthetic appeal of darker skins,
for all too many, a black skin was a disgurement of the worst kind. Thus
a reviewer of Hannah Mores poem commented:
Black is a colour which nature abhors. The eye startles and shrinks fromit when
it is rst presented; nothing inanimate wears this horrid gloom; and in the living
world, a black skin is peculiar to animals of the most peculiar and loathsome
kind.
o
And despite the ambivalent depictions of Othello and Oroonoko as
noble and learned men, many were convinced that Africans and all
black people, by denition, were inferior. David Humes footnote in
his :8 Philosophical Essay expresses attitudes possessed by many of his
countrymen:
There was never a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor even
any individual eminent in either action or speculation. . . Not to mention our
colonies, there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever
discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho low people without education will
start up among us and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica
indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but tis likely
he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks few
words plainly.
: