The English colonial project only really gets going in the middle of the 17th century.” That said, she does leave a stark question hanging in the air: “How did we go from this period of relative acceptance to becoming the biggest slave traders out there?”īlack Tudors does not make overblown claims about ethnic diversity in England – in her wider research, Kaufmann found around 360 individuals in the period 1500-1640 – but it does weave nonwhite Britons back into the texture of Tudor life. It’s about going back to before the English are slave traders, before they’ve got major colonies. “We need to return to England as it was at the time,” says Kaufmann – “an island nation on the edge of Europe with not much power, a struggling Protestant nation in perpetual danger of being invaded by Spain and being wiped out. Now they are.”ĭespite Kaufmann’s research, it is hard to swallow the idea that black people were not treated as extreme anomalies (or worse) in Tudor England. People weren’t asking questions about diversity. If you ask different questions, you get different answers. “It’s very much about what questions you ask of the past. So why has the existence of black Tudors been unknown, untold and untaught? “History isn’t a solid set of facts,” she replies.
Tudor fantasy town archive#
When I went to the National Archive for the first time, I asked an archivist where to start looking and they were like: ‘Oh well, you won’t find anything about that here.’” Kaufmann kept digging, contacted local record offices and ultimately built up to her book. “I’d never heard anything about it, despite having studied Tudor history at every level.
Kaufmann’s interest in black British history came about almost by accident: she intended to study Tudor sailors’ perceptions of Asia and America for her thesis at Oxford University, but found documents demonstrating the presence of Africans within Britain.
Miranda Kaufmann, author of Black Tudors.
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